PORTRAITS AND 
SKETCHES 



I 



PORTRAITS AND 
SKETCHES 

BY 

EDMUND GOSSE, C.B. 

AUTHOR OF " FATHER AND SON " 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1912 



Pn/zted in England 



TO 

H. OF 

THIS VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY 
DEDICATED 



ERRATA 

Page 32, line i<), fov "monotonous" read " momentou 
Page 28, line 3, fov " Le Faustin " read " La Faustin ' 
Page 244, line iS, for " Vogii^s" read " Vog\i6" 



PREFACE 



These short studies of authors whom I have known 
more or less intimately, and have observed with 
curiosity and admiration, base whatever value they 
may possess on their independence. They are 
imperfect, perhaps erroneous, but they are not 
second-hand. Whether they are the result of a 
few flashing glimpses, or of the patient scrutiny of 
many years, in either case they are my own. I hope 
that some of them, at least, may be found to possess 
the interest which attaches to even a rude pencil- 
sketch of a famous person, drawn faithfully from 
the life. 

The persons dealt with are of widely differing 
importance, and it is probable that posterity will 
intensify the distinction between them. Some 
names are here included which history may neglect 
altogether ; here are others which we believe will 
become more and more luminous with the passage 
of years. But the men discussed in the following 
pages had the common characteristic of devotion to 
literature ; all were writers, and each had, in his own 
time and way, a serious and even a passionate con- 
ception of the responsibilities of the art of writing. 
They were all, in their various capacities, engaged 

vii 



PREFACE 



in keeping bright, and in passing on unquenched, 
the torch of literary tradition. 

In the case of such men of letters, there has 
always seemed to me to be a singular interest in 
observing how personal character acts upon the 
work performed. It is less entertaining, for instance, 
to dwell exclusively on the verses of a poet, or ex- 
clusively on the incidents of his life, than to attempt 
the more complicated study of these elements in 
inter-relation to one another, as has been done, but 
only too rarely, in the best critical biographies. 
M. Paul Desjardins, in an amusing and illuminating 
phrase, speaks of " la cinematographic d'une abeille 
dans le mystere de la mellification." This, I confess, 
is what I like best in a literary biography, and it is 
what I have attempted to produce. To analyse the 
honey is one thing, and to dissect the bee another ; 
but I find a special pleasure in watching him, myself 
unobserved, in the act of building up and filling the 
cells. In what I have recorded, I have tried to 
concentrate attention, not on vague anecdotes and 
empty tricks of conduct, but on such traits of 
character as throw light on the man's intellect and 
imagination, and are calculated to help us in the 
enjoyment of his work. And while I hope I have 
never courted sensation by recounting anything 
scandalous, I have not hesitated to tell what I 
believe to be the truth, nor glossed over pecu- 
liarities of temperament when they help us to 
comprehend the published writings. 

Of all the human beings whom I have known, 

viii 



PREFACE 



I think that Algernon Swinburne was the most 
extraordinary. It is therefore needless to excuse 
the length of the essay with which this volume 
opens. Hitherto little that is trustworthy has been 
published about this amazing man, around whose 
career a good deal of legend has at one time or 
another crystallised. He was so much of a hermit 
of late years that curiosity has been glad to satisfy 
itself with tales which were picturesque although 
they were unfounded. I hope to start the work, 
which others will continue and make perfect, of 
preserving the true features of Swinburne as a poet 
and as a person. My recollections of his person 
and character are limited and imperfect, and no one 
is more conscious of their imperfection than I am ; 
but so far as I can ensure fidelity to the truth, they 
are true ; and I cannot help hoping that they will 
be of service to those, perhaps still unborn, who 
will elaborate the final portrait. Whatever vicis- 
situdes of taste our literature may undergo, one 
thing appears to me absolutely certain, that Swin- 
burne will end by taking his place as one of the few 
unchallenged Immortals, about whose personal and 
intellectual habits no faithful record is unwelcome. 

In'^Festus" Bailey and ^'Orion" Horne we have 
typical products of the transitional period between 
Shelley and Keats on the one hand and Tennyson 
and Browning on the other. Those who had an 
opportunity of conversing with these interesting 
and pathetic figures in their old age are growing 
rare, while no life of either of them has appeared. 

b iy 



PREFACE 



My recollections of Mandell Creighton were written 
down before the appearance of the Life " of 
him published by his accomplished widow. Mrs, 
Creighton's view of her husband's character, although 
so exhaustive and so largely illuminated by docu- 
ments, was pre-eminently ecclesiastical ; I venture 
to hope that there is therefore still an excuse for 
preserving the reminiscences of a lay friend, as an 
appendix to her excellent monument. This is still 
more the case in respect to Shorthouse, where the 
official biography, I am bound to confess, seems to 
me to present not an imperfect so much as a false 
impression of a very singular person. The great 
danger of twentieth-century biography is its un- 
willingness to accept any man's character save at 
the valuation of his most cautious relatives, and in 
consequence to reduce all figures to the same 
smooth forms and the same mediocre proportions. 

The last portrait in my little gallery is more 
obviously unfinished than any of the rest. If the 
presence of M. Andre Gide among so many of those 
who have passed away is objected to, I will say that 
I like to feel that I take one living friend with me in 
my round of respectful visits to the dead. His is 
not a portrait ; it is hardly an outline ; but I wish 
to delay no longer in recommending to the study 
of English readers a fascinating writer, still young, 
who is destined I believe to take a place in the very 
first rank of European writers. 

September 1^12 EDMUND GOSSE 



X 



CONTENTS 

PREFACE 

SWINBURNE 

PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

"ORION" HORNE 

AUBREY DE VERE 

A FIRST SIGHT OF TENNYSON 

A VISIT TO WHITTIER 

THE AUTHOR OF "JOHN INGLESANT 

MANDELL CREIGHTON 

ANDREW LANG 

WOLCOTT BALESTIER 

CARL SNOILSKY 

EUGENE MELCHIOR DE VOGU^: 

ANDRE GIDE 

INDEX 



SWINBURNE 

1837-1909 



SWINBURNE 

Men who to-day have not passed middle age can 
scarcely form an impression of what the name and 
fame of Algernon Charles Swinburne meant forty 
years ago to those who were then young and enthu- 
siastic candidates for apprenticeship in the fine arts. 
Criticism now looks upon his work — and possibly it 
is right in so looking — rather as closing than as 
opening a great poetic era. The conception is of a 
talent which collects all the detonating elements of 
a previous illumination, and lets them off, once and 
for all, in a prodigious culminating explosion, after 
which darkness ensues. But such a conception of 
Swinburne, as the floriated termination of the roman- 
tic edifice, or, once more to change the image, as 
one who brought up the rear of a long and straggling 
army, would have seemed to his adorers of 1869 not 
merely paradoxical but preposterous. It was not 
doubted by any of his admirers that here they held 
an incomparable poet of a new order, the fairest 
first-born son of fire," who was to inaugurate a new 
age of lyric gold. 

This conception was shared alike by the few who 
in those days knew him personally, and by the many 
•who did not. While the present writer was still in 

3 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

that outer class, he well remembers being told that 
an audience of the elect, to whom Swinburne recited 
the yet unpublished Dolores," had been moved to 
such incredible ecstasy by it that several of them 
had sunk on their knees, then and there, and adored 
him as a god. Those were blissful times, when 
poets and painters, if they were attached to Keats' 
^Mittle clan," might hope for honours which were 
private indeed, and strictly limited,|but almost divine 
The extraordinary reputation of Swinburne in the 
later sixties was constructed of several elements. 
It was built up on the legend of his mysterious 
and unprecedented physical appearance, of the 
astonishing verbal beauty of his writings, but most 
of all on his defiance^of the intellectual and religious 
prejudices of his age and generation. He was not 
merely a poet, but a flag ; and not merely a flag, but 
the Red Flag incarnate. There was an idea abroad, 
and it was not ill-founded, that in matters of taste 
the age in England had for some time been stationary, 
if not stagnant. It was necessary to wake people 
up ; as Victor Hugo had said : II faut rudoyer 
le genre humain," and in every gesture it was 
believed that Swinburne set forth to rudoyer " the 
Philistines. 

This was welcome to all young persons sitting in 
bondage, who looked up to Swinburne as to the 
deliverer. He also enjoyed, in popular beHef, the 
advantage of excessive youth. In point of fact, his 
immaturity was not so dazzling as was reported by 
the newspapers, or, alas ! as he then himself reported. 
4 



SWINBURNE 



When " Poems and Ballads " appeared he was in 
his thirtieth year, yet he was generally reported 
to be only twenty-four. This is interesting merely 
because there are five or six years of Swinburne's 
early manhood which seem to be without any visible 
history. What did he do with himself between 
i860, when ^'The Queen-Mother " was stillborn, and 
1865, when he flashed into universal prominence as 
the author of " Atalanta in Calydon " ? On the large 
scale, nothing ; on the small scale, the bibliographer 
(aided by the indefatigable Mr. Thomas ]. Wise) 
detects the review of Baudelaire's " Fleurs du Mai " 
in the Spectator (1862), and a dim sort of short 
story in prose called Dead Love" (1864). No 
doubt this was a time of tremendous growth in 
secret ; but, visibly, no flame or even smoke was 
ejected from the crater of the young volcano. 
Swinburne told me that he wrote the " Baudelaire " 
in a Turkish bath in Paris. (There were stranger 
groves of Academe than this.) No doubt the 
biographers of the future, intent on rubbing the 
gold-dust off the butterflies' wings, will tell us every- 
thing day by day. Meanwhile, these early years 
continue to be delightfully mysterious, and he was 
nearly thirty when he dawned in splendour on 
London. 

Swinburne's second period lasted from 1865 to 
187 1. This was the blossoming-time of the aloe, 
when its acute perfume first filled the literary salons, 
and then emptied them ; when for a very short time 
the poet emerged from his life-long privacy and trod 

5 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



the social stage. The experiment culminated, I 
suppose, in his solitary public utterance. He might 
be called Single-speech Swinburne/' since positively 
his only performance on his legs was an after-dinner 
oration, in May 1866, when he responded to the 
toast of "The Imaginative Literature of England" 
at Willis's Rooms. This second period was brilliant, 
but stormy. Swinburne was constitutionally unfitted 
to shine in mixed society. The events in his career 
now came fast and thick. The " Atalanta," acclaimed 
in 1865, had been followed later in the same year by 
" Chastelard," which made old men begin to dream 
dreams, and in 1866 by Poems and Ballads," which 
roused a scandal unparalleled since Byron left 
England exactly half a century before. 

Then, when the fury of the public was at its 
height, there was a meeting between Jowett and 
Mazzini, at the house of Mr. George Howard 
(afterwards the ninth Earl of Carlisle), to discuss 
" what can be done with and for Algernon." And 
then there came the dedication to the Republic, 
" the beacon-bright Republic far-off sighted," and 
all the fervour and intellectual frenzies were success- 
fully diverted from " such tendrils as the wild Loves 
wear" to the luminous phantasms of liberty and 
tyrannicide, to the stripping of the muffled souls 
of kings, and to all the other glorious, generous 
absurdities of the Mazzini-haunted " Songs before 
Sunrise" (1871). This was the period when, after 
an unlucky experience of London Society, the poet 
fled to the solitudes again, and nearly lost his life 
6 



SWINBURNE 

swimming in the harbour of Etretat. Of this episode 
I shall presently give a full account. The autumn 
of 1870 saw him once again in London. It is at this 
moment; when Swinburne was in his thirty-fourth 
year, that the recollections which I venture to set 
down before they be forgotten practically begin. 
They represent the emotional observations of a boy 
on whom this mysterious and almost symbolical 
luminary turned those full beams which were then 
and afterwards so thriftily withdrawn from the world 
at large. 

That I may escape as quickly as possible from the 
necessity of speaking of myself, and yet may detail 
the credentials of my reminiscences, let me say that 
my earliest letter from Swinburne was dated Sep- 
tember 14, 1867, when I was still in my eighteenth 
year, and that I first saw him in 1868. I was not 
presented to him, however, until the last week in 
1870, when, in a note from the kind hostess who 
brought us together, I find it stated: "Algernon 
took to you at once, as is seldom the case with him." 
In spite of this happy beginning, the acquaintance 
remained superficial until 1873, when, I hardly 
know how, it ripened suddenly into an intimate 
friendship. From that time until he left London 
for good in the autumn of 1879 I saw Swinburne 
very frequently indeed, and for several years later 
than that our intercourse continued to be close. 
These relations were never interrupted, except by 
his increasing deafness and general disinclination to 
leave home. I would, then, say that the memories 

7 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



I venture to bring forward deal mainly with the 
years from 1873 to 1880, but extend a little before 
and after that date. 

I 

The physical conditions which accompany and 
affect what we call genius are obscure, and have 
hitherto attracted little but empirical notice. It is 
impossible not to see that the absolutely normal man 
or woman, as we describe normality, is very rarely 
indeed an inventor, or a seer, or even a person of 
remarkable mental energy. The bulk of what are 
called entirely " healthy " people add nothing to the 
sum of human achievement, and it is not the average 
navvy who makes a Darwin, nor the typical daughter 
of the plough who develops into an Elizabeth Barrett 
Browning. There are probably few professional men 
who offer a more insidious attack upon all that in 
the past has made life variegated and interesting 
than the school of robust and old - fashioned 
physicians who theorise on eccentricity, on varia- 
tions of the type, as necessarily evil and obviously 
to be stamped out, if possible, by the State. The 
more closely we study, with extremely slender 
resources of evidence, the lives of great men of 
imagination and action since the beginning of the 
world, the more clearly we ought to recognise that 
a reduction of all the types to one stolid uniformity 
of what is called " health " would have the effect of 
depriving humanity of precisely those individuals 
8 



SWINBURNE 

who have added most to the beauty and variety of 
human existence. 

This question is one which must in the near 
future attract the close and sympathetic attention 
of the medical specialist. At present there seems 
to be an almost universal confusion between mor- 
bid aberration and wholesome abnormality. The 
presence of the latter amongst us is, indeed, scarcely 
recognised, and an unusual individuality is almost 
invariably treated as a subject either of disease or of 
affected oddity. When the physical conditions of men 
of the highest celebrity in the past are touched upon, 
it is usual to pass them over with indifference, or 
else to account for them as the results of disease. 
The peculiarities of Pascal, or of Pope, or of 
Michelangelo are either denied, or it is presumed 
that they were the result of purely morbid factors 
against which their genius, their rectitude, or their 
common-sense more or less successfully contended. 
It is admitted that Tasso had a hypersensitive con- 
stitution, which cruelty tortured into melancholia^ 
but it is taken for granted that he would have been a 
greater poet if he had taken plenty of outdoor 
exercise. Descartes was of a different opinion, for 
though his body was regarded as feeble and some- 
what abnormal, he considered it a machine well 
suited to his own purposes, and was convinced that 
the Cartesian philosophy would not have been im- 
proved, though the philosopher's digestion might,, 
by his developing the thews of a ploughboy. 

These reflections are natural in looking back upoa 

9 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



the constitution of Swinburne, which I believe to 
have been one of the most extraordinary that have 
been observed in our time. It would be a pity if its 
characteristics should be obscured by caricature on 
the one hand or by false sentiment on the other. In 
the days when I watched him closely I found 
myself constantly startled by the physical problem : 
What place has this singular being in the genus 
homo f It would easily be settled by the vague 
formula of " degeneration/' but to a careful eye 
there was nothing in Swinburne of what is known 
as the debased or perverse type. The stigmata of 
the degenerate, such as we have been taught to note 
them, were entirely absent. Here were, to the out- 
ward and untechnical perception at least, no radical 
effects of disease, hereditary or acquired. He stood 
on a different physical footing from other men ; he 
formed, as Cowley said of Pindar, " a vast species 
alone." If there had been a planet peopled by 
Swinburnes, he would have passed as an active, 
healthy, normal specimen of it. All that was extra- 
ordinary in him was not, apparently, the result of 
ill-health, but of individual and inborn peculiarity. 

The world is familiar from portraits, and still 
better from caricatures, with his unique appearance. 
He was short, with sloping shoulders, from which 
rose a long and slender neck, surmounted by a very 
large head. The cranium seemed to be out of all 
proportion to the rest of the structure. His spine 
was rigid, and though he often bowed the heaviness 
of his head, lasso papavera collo, he seemed never to 
lo 



SWINBURNE 

bend his back. Except in consequence of a certain 
physical weakness, which probably may, in more 
philosophical days, come to be accounted for and 
palliated — except when suffering from this external 
cause, he seemed immune from all the maladies 
that pursue mankind. He did not know fatigue ; 
his agility and brightness were almost mechanical. 
I never heard him complain of a headache or of 
a toothache. He required very little sleep, and 
occasionally when I have parted from him in the 
evening after saying Good-night," he has simply 
sat back in the deep sofa in his sitting-room, his 
little feet close together, his arms against his side, 
folded in his frock-coat like a grasshopper in its 
wing-covers, and fallen asleep, apparently for the 
night, before I could blow out the candles and 
steal forth from the door. I am speaking, of course, 
of early days ; it was thus about 1875 that I closely 
observed him. 

He was more a hypertrophied intelligence than 
a man. His vast brain seemed to weigh down 
and give solidity to a frame otherwise as light 
as thistledown, a body almost as immaterial as 
that of a fairy. In the streets he had the move- 
ments of a somnambulist, and often I have seen 
him passing like a ghost across the traffic of 
Holborn, or threading the pressure of carts east- 
ward in Gray's Inn Road, without glancing to the 
left or the right, like something blown before a 
wind. At that time I held a humble post at the 
British Museum, from which I was freed at four 

1 1 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



o'clock, and Swinburne liked to arrange to meet me 
half-way between that monument and his own 
lodgings. One of Swinburne's peculiarities was an 
extreme punctuality, and we seldom failed to meet on 
the deserted northern pavement of Great Coram 
Street. But although the meeting was of his own 
making, and the person to be met a friend seen every 
day, if I stood a couple of yards before him silent, he 
would endeavour to escape on one side and then on 
the other, giving a great shout of satisfaction when at 
length his eyes focused on my face. 

He was very fond of talking about his feats of 
swimming and riding as a boy, and no other poet 
has written about the former exercise with so much 
felicity and ardour : 

As one that ere a June day rise 

Makes seaward for the dawn, and tries 
The water with delighted limbs. 
That tastes the sweet dark sea, and swims 

Right eastward under strengthening skies. 
And sees the gradual rippling rims 

Of waves whence day breaks blossom-wise 
Take fire ere light peer well above. 
And laughs from all his heart with love ; 

And softlier swimming, with raised head. 
Feels the full flower of morning shed. 

And fluent' sunrise round him rolled. 

That laps and laves his body bold 
With fluctuant heaven in water's stead. 

And urgent through the growing gold 
Strikes, and sees all the spray flash red, 

12 



SWINBURNE 



And his soui takes the sun, and yearns 

For joy wherewith the seds heart burns, . , . 

There is nothing to approach it elsewhere in litera- 
ture. It was founded on experience in the surf of 
Northumberland, and Swinburne's courage and zest 
as a bather were superb. But I was assured by- 
earlier companions that he made remarkably little 
way by swimming, and that his feats were mainly of 
floating, his little body tossing on the breakers like 
a cork. His father, the admiral, had taught him to 
plunge in the sea when he was a very little child, 
taking him up in his arms and flinging him out 
among the waves. His cousin, Lord Redesdale, 
tells me that at Eton Algernon " could swim for 
ever," but he was always muscularly feeble, making 
up for this deficiency by his splendid courage and 
confidence. 

No physiologist who studied the corporeal condi- 
tion of Swinburne could avoid observing the violent 
elevation of spirits to which he was constantly 
subject. The slightest emotional excitement, of 
anger, or pleasure, or admiration, sent him into 
a state which could scarcely be called anything but 
convulsive. He was like that little geyser in 
Iceland which is always simmering, but which, if it 
is irritated by having pieces of turf thrown into it, 
instantly boils over and flings its menacing column 
at the sky. I was never able to persuade myself 
whether the extraordinary spasmodic action of the 
arms and legs which accompanied these paroxysms 

13 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



was the result of nature or habit. It was violent 
and it was long-continued, but I never saw that it 
produced fatigue. It gradually subsided into a 
graceful and smiling calm, sometimes even into 
somnolence, out of which, however, a provocative 
remark would instantly call up again the surprising 
spasm of the geyser. The poet's surviving sister^ 
Miss Isabel Swinburne, tells me that this trick of 
stiffly drawing down his arms from the shoulders 
and giving a rapid vibratory movement to his hands 
was voluntary in childhood ; she considers that it 
spoiled his shoulders and made them sloping. In 
later years I am sure it had become instinctive and 
unconscious. She describes to me also the extra- 
ordinary ecstasy which shook his body and lighted 
up his face when reading a book which delighted 
him or when speaking of any intellectual pleasure. 
Swinburne seemed to me to divide his hours 
between violent cerebral excitement and sheer 
immobility, mental and physical. He would sit for 
a long time together without stirring a limb, his 
eyes fixed in a sort of trance, and only his lips 
shifting and shivering a little, without a sound. 

The conception of Swinburne, indeed, as inces- 
santly flamboyant and convulsive is so common 
that it may be of value to note that he was, on 
the contrary, sometimes pathetically plaintive and 
distressed. The following impression, written 
down next day (January 4, 1878), reveals a 
Swinburne little imagined by the public, but 
frequently enough to be observed in those days by 
14 



SWINBURNE 

intimate friends. It describes a slightly later condition 
than that on which I have hitherto dwelt : 

Swinburne has become very much at home 
with us, and, knowing our eating-times, he drops in 
every fortnight or so to dinner, and stays through 
the evening. All this winter he has been noticeably 
worn and feeble, sometimes tottering like an old 
man, and glad to accept a hand to help him up and 
down stairs. I hear he is very violent between 
whiles, but he generally visits us during the 
exhaustion and depression which follow his fits of 
excitement, when he is tired of his loneliness at 
Great James Street, and seems to crave the comfort 
of home-life and the petting that we lavish on him» 
Last night he arrived about 5 p.m. ; he was waiting 
for me when I came back from the office. The 
maid had seen him into my study, brightened the 
fire and raised the lamp, but although she left him 
cosily seated under the light, I found him mourn- 
fully wandering, like a lost thing, on the staircase. 
We happened to be quite alone, and he stayed 
on for six hours. He was extremely gentle, bright,, 
and sensible at dinner, full of gay talk about early 
memories, his recollections of Dickens, and odd 
anecdotes of older Oxford friends, Jowett, Stubbs^ 
and the present Bishop of Ely [James Russell 
Woodford]. Directly dinner was over he insisted 
on seeing the baby, whom on these occasions he 
always kisses, and worships on his knees, and is 
very fantastic over. When he and I were alone, he 
closed up to the fire, his great head bowed, his 

15 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



knees held tight together, and his finger-tips pressed 
to his chest, in what I call his ' penitential ' attitude, 
and he began a long tale, plaintive and rather 
vague, about his loneliness, the sadness of his life, 
the suffering he experiences from the slanders of 
others. He said that George Eliot was hounding 
on her myrmidons to his destruction. I made out 
that this referred to some attack in a newspaper 
which he supposes, very groundlessly I expect, 
to be inspired by George Eliot. Swinburne said 
that a little while ago he found his intellectual 
energy succumbing under a morbid distress at his 
isolation, and that he had been obliged steadily to 
review before his conscience his imaginative life in 
order to prevent himself from sinking into despair. 
This is only a mood, to be sure ; but if there 
be any people who think so ill of him, I only wish 
they could see him as we see him at these recupera- 
tive intervals. Whatever he may be elsewhere, in 
our household not a kinder, simpler, or more 
affectionate creature could be desired as a visitor. 
The only fault we find with him is that his little 
mournful ways and his fragility drag painfully upon 
our sympathy." 

This, it will be admitted, is not the Swinburne of 
legend in the seventies, and that it is so different 
may be judged, I hope, my excuse for recording it. 
A very sensible further change came over him 
when he was attacked by deafness, an infirmity to 
which, I believe, most members of his family have 
been liable. I do not think that I noticed any 
16 



SWINBURNE 



hardness of hearing until 1880, when the affliction 
rapidly developed. He was, naturally, very much 
concerned at it, and in the summer of that year he 
wrote to a lady of my household, If this gets worse 
I shall become wholly unfit to mix in any society 
where two or three are gathered together." It did 
get worse ; it was constitutional and incurable, and 
for the last quarter of a century of his life he 
was almost impervious to outward sound. All the 
more, therefore, was he dependent on the care 
of the devoted friend who thenceforward guarded 
him so tenderly. 



II 

The year 1868 was one of the most troubled in 
Swinburne's existence. He had now reached his 
thirty-second year, and there had succeeded a 
reaction to his juvenile flow of animal spirits, to his 
inexhaustible fecundity, and even to the violent 
celebrity which had stimulated and incited him as 
with the sting of a gad-fly. His first period of 
creative energy had come to a close, and he had not 
yet begun, or only now was beginning to launch 
steadily upon, his second, namely, the celebration in 
transcendental verse, and under the auspices of 
Mazzini, of the ideal and indivisible Republic. He 
was dejected in mind and ailing in body ; the 
wonderful colours of youth were now first beginning 
to fade out of his miraculous eyes and hair. In 

B 17 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

April, having written ^'The Hymn of Man," and 
having sent his great prose monograph on " William 
Blake " to the press, Swinburne paused and looked 
round him with a melancholy which had never 
afflicted him before. He complained, humorously 
and angrily, of illness hardly intermittent during 
weeks and months of weather which would have 
disgraced hell and raised a revolution among devils." 
His principal pleasure was the encouragement given 
him by Mazzini, ^*my beloved Chief, still with us, 
very ill and indomitable, and sad and kind as ever." 

Siena " was finished in May, and " Tiresias " was 
begun in June. Swinburne was doggedly and pain- 
fully working at what he always called *^His book," the 
Chief's book, the volume of political lyrics which 
Mazzini had commanded him to write for the glory 
of Liberty and Italia. 

It was in the evening of July lo, 1868, that I first 
cast leyes on the poet who was at that timeithe 
divinity, the object of feverish worship, to every 
budding artist and faltering singer in England. The 
occasion was accidental, the circumstances painful ; 
it is enough to say that the idol was revealed to the 
juvenile worshipper at a startling moment of physical 
suffering and distress, and that the impression was 
one of curious terror, never, even under happier 
auspices, to be wholly removed. I shall not lose that 
earliest, and entirely unanticipated, image of a lan- 
guishing and pain-stricken Swinburne, like some odd 
conception of Aubrey Beardsley, a Cupido cruciftxus 
on a chair of anguish. I recall it here because, 

l8 



SWINBURNE 



although in truth he was not nearly so ill as he looked, 
this apparition explains to me the imperative neces- 
sity which his friends found in the summer of that 
year to get him away from London, away from 
England, and if so, whither, if not to his beloved 
France ? 

It was projected that, so soon as he was well 
enough to move, he should go over to Boulogne^ 
where a Welsh friend, Mr. Powell of Nant-Eos, was 
to receive him. But this was not found immediately 
possible ; the poet's journey was delayed, partly by 
his own continued weakness, then by an illness of 
his mother, so that it was not until September that 
he joined Powell at Etretat. Of this, his preliminary 
stay there, little record seems to remain. It was 
already late for bathing, and the weather turned 
bad. The party soon broke up. But Swinburne 
stayed long enough to form a great liking for the 
village, which was anything but the fashionable 
watering-place which it has since grown to be. It 
was a cluster of little old houses, with whitewashed 
walls and turfed roofs, inhabited by a sturdy race of 
Norman fishermen. Etretat had been discovered " 
about ten years before this time by certain artists, 
particularly by Isabey and by the younger Clarkson 
Stanfield, all of whom kept their " discovery " very 
quiet. But Alphonse Karr, in his novels, had been 
unable to preserve a like reticence, and Paris had 
now waked up to the picturesque capacities of 
Etretat. Villas were beginning to be built along the 
edge of the two chalk cliffs and down the Grand Val. 

19 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

It was none of these little smart villas, it was a 
dwelling of the local Norman type, which was to 
be identified in such a curious way with the legend 
of Swinburne. 

Whether the purchase had already been made, or 
whether it was concluded after Swinburne left;, 
or whether indeed the little place was not simply 
rented, year after year — at all events the beautified 
cottage in question passed about this time into the 
possession of Powell, who lived there for several 
years and entertained Swinburne summer after 
summer. He became an astonishing figure of 
eccentricity in the eyes of the simple fishermen of 
Etretat. It was he or Swinburne, or the precious 
pair of farceurs together, who gave the little house 
the sinister name of the Chaumiere de Dolmance,, 
which presupposed a considerable amount of out- 
of-the-way reading in the passer-by who was to be 
scandalised. It did not scandalise, but very much 

intrigued " a sturdy youth who often crossed its 
painted legend in his holidays, and who had already 
read enough " undesirable " literature to wonder 
what this was all about, and what odd beings chose 
to advertise that they inhabited the Chaumiere de 
Dolmance. It is necessary to sweep away a good 
many cobwebs of romance in dealing with the rela- 
tions between Swinburne and Guy de Maupassant ;. 
for the sturdy youth was no other than he. In the 
following pages I hope to clear up, in some measure, 
the mystification which each of them wove around 
the legend in later years. 
20 



SWINBURNE 

In the first place, it is needful to understand that 
Maupassant was not the famous writer he after- 
wards became. He was a youth of eighteen, and 
six years were to elapse before his nostrils snuffed 
up the odour of printers' ink. Etretat was his 
mother's summer home. Very soon after his birth 
Madame de Maupassant bought a small property in 
the Norman village, and here the future novelist's 
childhood was passed. The cure of Etretat prepared 
him for school, first for the seminary of the neigh- 
bouring town of Yvetot, that citadel of Norman 
wit," and afterwards for Rouen ; but all his holidays 
were spent among the fishermen of Etretat, going 
out with them in their boats by day and night, 
wrestling and climbing with their boys, scaling the 
slippery chalk cliffs to watch for their returning 
sails. It was not, therefore, a scandal-mongering 
journalist of Paris who pushed himself on the notice 
of the two Englishmen, but an extremely vivid and 
observant boy practically native to the soil, who 
examined the strange visitors with a wholly legiti- 
mate curiosity. The good faith of Guy de Maupas- 
sant, which has been called in question, must be 
defended. During these years, and till the war 
broke out, Maupassant was a student at the Lycee 
of Rouen, working under the benevolent eye of 
Gustave Flaubert, rapidly advancing in solid physi- 
cal vigour, but giving little indication of his future 
line of action except in the painful writing of verses. 
He was, however, preternaturally wide-awake ; and 
sweeping the horizon of Etretat, he became aware, 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



summer after summer, of a remarkable pair of 
exotics. 

The incident which led to his forming Swin- 
burne's acquaintance must now be told with some 
minuteness, partly because, as an adventure, it was 
the most important in the poet's career, and partly 
because it has been made the subject of many vague 
and contradictory rumours. Swinburne, as we have 
already seen, was a daring bather, and one of the 
main attractions of Etretat was the facility it gave for 
exercise in the sea. On a certain Friday in the late 
summer at about lo a.m., the poet went down alone 
to a solitary point on the eastern side of the plage^ 
the Porte d'Amont — for there is no real harbour at 
Etretat — divested himself of his clothes, and plunged 
in, as was his wont. The next thing that happened 
was that a man called Coquerel, who was on the 
outlook at the semaphore, being at the foot of the 
cliffs on the eastern side of the bay, heard continued 
cries for help and piercing screams. He climbed up 
on a sort of rock of chalk, called Le Banc a Cuve, 
and perceived that a swimmer, who had been caught 
by the tide, which runs very heavily at that place, 
was being hurried out to sea, in spite of the violent 
efforts which he was making to struggle for his life. 
As it was impossible for Coquerel to do anything 
else to help the drowning man, he was starting to 
race along the shore to Etretat, when he saw 
coming round the point one of the fishing-smacks 
of the village. Coquerel attracted the attention of 
this boat, and directed the captain to the point out 
22 



SWINBURNE 

at sea where Swinburne's cries were growing fainter 
and further. The captain of the smack very cleverly 
seized the situation, and followed the poet, who 
had now ceased to struggle, but who supported 
himself by floating on the surface of the tide. 
This was hurrying him along so swiftly that he 
was not picked up until at a point a mile to the 
east-north-east of the eastern point of Etretat. It 
is a great pleasure to me, after more than forty 
years, to be able to give the name of the man 
who saved the life of one of the greatest poets of 
England. I hope that Captain Theodule Vallin 
may be remembered with gratitude by the lovers 
of literature. 

The story hitherto is from Etretat sources. I now 
take it up as Swinburne told it to me, not very long 
after the event. His account did not differ in any 
essential degree from what has just been said. But 
he told me that soon after having left the Porte 
d'Amont he felt the under-current of the tide take 
possession of him, and he was carried out to sea 
through a rocky archway. Now, when it was too late, 
he recollected that the fishermen had warned him 
that he ought not to bathe without taking the tide 
into consideration. He tried to turn, to get out of 
the stream ; but it was absolutely impossible, he was 
drawn on like a leaf. (What he did not say, of 
course, was that although he was absolutely untiring 
in the sea, and as familiar with it as a South Sea 
islander , the weakness of his arms prevented his 
being able to swim fast or far, so that he depended on 

23 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



frequent interludes of floating.) At first he fought 
to get out of the tide, and then, realising the hope- 
lessness of this, he set himself to shout and yell, and 
he told me that the sound of his own voice, in that 
stillness of racing water, struck him as very strange 
and dreadful. Then he ceased to scream, and 
floated as limply as possible, carried along, and 
then he was suddenly aware that in a few minutes he 
would be dead, for the possibility of his being saved 
did not occur to him. 

I asked him what he thought about in that 
dreadful contingency, and he replied that he had 
no experience of what people often profess to 
witness, the concentrated panorama of past life 
hurrying across the memory. He did not reflect 
on the past at all. He was filled with annoyance 
that he had not finished his Songs before Sunrise," 
and then with satisfaction that so much of it was 
ready for the press, and that Mazzini would be 
pleased with him. And then he continued : " I 
reflected with resignation that I was exactly the 
same age as Shelley was when he was drowned." 
(This, however, was not the case ; Swinburne had 
reached that age in March 1867 ; but this was part of a 
curious delusion of Swinburne's that he was younger 
by two or three years than his real age.) Then, 
when he began to be, I suppose, a little benumbed 
by the water, his thoughts fixed on the clothes he 
had left on the beach, and he worried his clouding 
brain about some unfinished verses in the pocket of 
his coat. I suppose that he then fainted, for he 
24 



SWINBURNE 



could not recollect being reached by the smack or 
lifted on board. 

The fishermen, however, drew the poet success- 
fully out of the water. Ivy should have grown up 
the masts and the sound of flutes have been heard 
in the forecastle, as when Dionysus boarded the 
pirate-vessel off Naxos. Captain Vallin was not 
much less astonished at his capture than the Icarians 
were, for Swinburne immediately displayed his 
usual vivacity. The Marie-Marthe — for that was the 
name of the boat — proceeded on her voyage to 
Yport. The weather was glorious ; the poef s body 
was rubbed by|the horny hands of his rescuers, and 
then wrapped in a spare sail, over which his mane 
of orange-ruddy hair was spread to dry, like a fan. 
He proceeded to preach to the captain and his men, 
who surrounded him, he told me, in rapturous 
approval, the doctrines of the Republic, and then he 
recited to them, by the hour together," the poems 
of Victor Hugo. He was given some food, and in 
the course of the morning the Marie-Marthe, with her 
singular supercargo, tacked into the harbour -of 
Yport. 

Meanwhile, Swinburne's English friend and host, 
who had been near him on the shore, but not him- 
self bathing, had, with gathering anxiety, seen him 
rapidly and unresistingly hurried out to sea through 
the rocky archway until he passed entirely out of 
sight. He immediately recollected — what Swin- 
burne had forgotten — the treacherous under-currents 
so prevalent and so much dreaded on that dangerous 

25 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

coast. After Mr. Powell had lost sight of the poet 
for what seemed to him at least ten minutes, his 
anxiety was turned into horror, for there were shouts 
heard on the cliffs above him to the effect that " a 
man was drowning." He gathered up Swinburne's 
clothes in his arms, and ran ankle-deep in the 
loose shingle to where some boats were lying on the 
beach. These immediately started to the rescue ; in 
but a few minutes after their departure, however, a 
boat arriving at Etretat from the east brought the 
welcome news that no catastrophe had happened, 
but that the Marie-Marthe had been seen to pick 
the Englishman up out of the water, and to continue 
her course towards Yport. Mr. Powell, therefore, 
took a carriage and galloped off at fullest speed, 
with Swinburne's clothes, and arrived at Yport just 
in time to see the Marie-Marthe enter the harbour, 
with Swinburne in excellent spirits and, wrapped in 
a sail, gesticulating on the deck. 

What greatly astonished the Normans was that, 
after so alarming an adventure and so bitter an 
experience of the treachery of the sea, Swinburne 
was by no means willing to abandon il. The friends 
dismissed their carriage, and lunched at the pleasant 
little inn between the place and the sea ; and having 
found that the Marie-Marthe was returning to Etretat 
in the afternoon, they took a walk along the cliffs 
until Captain Vallin had finished his business in 
Yport, when they returned with him by sea. This 
conduct was thought eccentric ; it would have been 
natural to prefer a land journey at such a moment. 
26 



SWINBURNE 

But, as the captain approvingly said, Ceut ete trop 
peu anglais." Everybody who had helped in the 
salvage was generously rewarded, and Swinburne 
and his friend were, for at least twenty-four hours^ 
the most popular of the residents of Etretat. 

It is not till now, at the twelfth hour, that Guy 
de Maupassant comes into the story. It is only fair 
to say that he never asserted, nor acquiesced in the 
assertion made by others, that he himself, on his own 
yacht, rescued Swinburne. A collegian of nineteen^ 
at home for the holidays, a yacht was the last thing 
he was likely to possess. But he jumped on board 
one of those fishing-smacks which Mr. Powell sent 
out, and the boat he was on turned back only on 
hearing that the Marie-Mai'the had already saved the 
drowning man. Who the latter was Maupassant 
did not learn until the evening of the same day, when 
he discovered that it was the English poet who had 
arrived, not long before, to be the guest of a strange 
Englishman, accomplished and extravagant, who 
occasionally conversed with Maupassant, as he paced 
the shingle-beach, and who had already excited his 
curiosity. " Ce Monsieur Powell," says Maupassant, 
etonnait le pays par une vie extremement solitaire 
et bizarre aux yeux de bourgeois et de matelots 
peu accoutumes aux fantaisies et aux excentricites 
anglaises." In later years Maupassant was in the 
habit of describing, and doubtless of amplifying, for 
the amusement of Parisian friends, these " English 
eccentricities," and in particular he regaled Heredia 
and the Goncourts with them. Edmond de 

27 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

Goncourt wrote a novel, once famous, which there 
are now none to praise and very few to read, called 
" Le Faustin." This work is evidently founded on 
the gossip of Guy de Maupassant; but no one 
needs to waste his time searching in it for a portrait 
of Swinburne, for it is not there. 

Maupassant's obliging zeal in hurrying to Swin- 
burne's help was rewarded on the following day by 
an invitation to lunch at the Chaumiere de Dol- 
mance. The two Englishmen were waiting for 
him in a pretty garden, verdurous and shady. 
Their visitor describes the house as une toute basse 
maison normande construite en silex et coiffee de 
chaume," the very type ot building in which the 
tragedies and comedies of rustic life in the Seine- 
Inferieure were to figure, years later, in the tales of 
the juvenile visitor. The eyes of that visitor, by the 
way, if youthful, were exceedingly sharp and bright ; 
although he had not yet learned the artifice of prose 
expression, the power of observing and noting 
character was already highly developed in him. 
His account of the meeting, accordingly, is a very 
curious document, and one which a historian must 
touch with care. As it advances, with the desire to 
astonish and scandalise, it certainly borders on the 
apocryphal, and justifies Swinburne's indignation 
towards the end of his life. But the opening 
paragraphs bear the impress of absolute truth, and 
truth seen by the most clairvoyant of observers. 

This, then, is how our poet struck the Norman 
boy who had never read a line of his verses. M. 
28 



SWINBURNE 

Swinburne was small and thin, amazingly thin at 
first sight, a sort of fantastic apparition. When 
I looked at him for the first time, I thought of 
Edgar Poe. The forehead was very large under 
long hair, and the face went narrowing down to a 
tiny chin, shaded by a thin tuft of beard. A very 
slight moustache slipped over lips which were 
extraordinarily delicate and were pressed together, 
while what seemed an endless neck joined this 
head,lwhich was alive only in its bright, penetrating, 
and fixed eyes, to a body without shoulders, since 
the upper part of Swinburne's chest seemed 
scarcely broader than his forehead. The whole of 
this almost supernatural personage was stirred by 
nervous shudders. He was very cordial, very 
easy of access ; and the extraordinary charm of his 
intelligence bewitched me from the first moment." 
There may be a touch of emphasis in this, a slight 
effect of caricature ; but no one who knew 
Swinburne in those days will dare to deny the 
general fidelity of the portrait. 

During the course of their life at Etretat the con- 
versation of the friends continually turned on art, 
on literature, even on music, about which Powell 
was then greatly exercised. Swinburne did not 
recognise the difference between one tune and 
another, but he took a cerebral interest in music* 
The friends were entranced by the fame of Wagner 
and of Berlioz, who was much discussed in art 
circles ; it is to be doubted whether either of them 
had heard any of the compositions of these 

29 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



musicians performed in public or in private. It 
was the attitude of Wagner which attracted and 
dehghted them, while Swinburne had a curious 
conviction of sympathy with Berlioz, who died just 
about this time, leaving a mysterious reputation 
behind him. I have heard Swinburne express an 
overwhelming desire to be present when " La 
Damnation de Faust " was performed, and he was 
prepared, or almost prepared, to take a journey 
to Leipzig for that particular purpose. He had read 
some of Berlioz' musical criticism, which used to 
appear (I think) in Le Figaro^ and he exulted in the 
French musician's eulogies of Shakespeare. The 
Memoires " of Berlioz were published later, but I 
think Swinburne had read Les Grotesques de 
la Musique." Rapturous appreciation of music 
which he had never heard did not preclude, on 
Mr. Powell's part, enjoyment of music which he 
shared with all the world ; and Offenbach, then 
laden with the laurels of " La Grande Duchesse 
de Gerolstein," was an honoured guest at the 
Chaumiere while Swinburne was there. 

But it was literature and art on which the poet 
discoursed with the greatest glow and abundance. 
Maupassant was dazzled, as well he might be, by 
the erudition, by the imagination, by the daring, by 
what seemed to him the perversity of the incredible 
English genius. It is impossible not to regret that 
Maupassant neglected, on the successive occasions 
when he spent some hours with Swinburne at 
Etretat, to note down, as he could have done, even 
30 



SWINBURNE 

at that early age, with admirable fidelity, some of the 
meteoric showers which crossed the vault of that 
high conversation. It is true that some of them, as 
the Frenchman merrily indicates, would demand, 
or would have demanded in mid-Victorian times, 
the gauze of Latinity to subdue their brilliance. 
Maupassant was particularly struck — and this is 
very interesting as the criticism of a Frenchman — 
with the Latin character of Swinburne's mind. He 
thought that the Roman imagination had no secrets 
from him, and Swinburne showed him Latin verses 
of his own, which Maupassant considered admir- 
ables comme si Tame de ce peuple [the Roman race] 
etait restee en lui." Let us not ask whether the boy 
of eighteen was highly competent to judge of the 
Latinity of these verses ; he could at least perfectly 
appreciate the poet's compliment. 

As a Republican of the innermost sect of Mazzini 
it was necessary, that Swinburne should proclaim, in 
season and out of season, his political convictions. 
He did not spare them to his young friend ; and he 
did not conceal his loathing for " the Accursed," as 
he called Napoleon III., then drawing much nearer 
to his end than anybody guessed. Maupassant was 
not scandalised by these opinions, but he noted the 
oddity of their being held by one so essentially 
an aristocrat, so much a noble to the tips of his 
fingers, as Swinburne evidently was. The visitor 
turned the subject to Victor Hugo, of whom 
the English poet spoke, as he always did, with 
unbridled enthusiasm. As Swinburne's flow of 

31 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



unaffected conversation became easier and fuller 
the astonishment of Maupassant increased. He 
thought his English acquaintance the most exasper- 
atedly artistic human being whom he had ever met ; 
and in later years, when he had become acquainted 
with all Paris, he still thought so. He was not 
altogether in sympathy with Swinburne, however. 
He considered that in his way of looking at 
literature and life there was something macabre ; 
that, with all his splendour of thought, he suffered 
from a malady of spiritual vision, and that a 
perversity of temper mingled with the magic of his 
fancy. It would be folly to deny that, in this also, 
the young visitor showed a rare clairvoyance. 

At the close of his visit to France in the summer 
of 1869 Swinburne devoted a month of the time 
otherwise spent at Etretat to an excursion of which 
no account has hitherto, I think, been published. 
It was in some ways so monotonous, from the 
associations connected with it, that it ought to be 
recorded. Richard Burton, with whom Swinburne 
had now for some years been intimate, was 
appointed British consul in Damascus. As he had 
just returned from Santos in rather poor health, he 
was advised to take a course of the Vichy waters 
before he proceeded to Syria. He proposed that 
Swinburne should join him, which the poet, 
although greatly enjoying the sea-bathing at 
Etretat, instantly agreed to do. They met at 
Boulogne and reached Vichy on July 24. Five 
days later the poet wrote " Vichy suits me splen- 
32 



SWINBURNE 



didly/' and indeed he was now entering upon one 
of the most completely happy months of his life. 
He delighted in the breezy company of Burton, 
and at Vichy they found two other friends, 
Frederick Leighton and Adelaide Kemble (Mrs. 
Sartoris), whose Week in a French Country- 
house " had recently revealed the existence of a 
new and exquisite humorist. This quartette of 
brilliant compatriots met daily, and entertained one 
another to the top of their bent. Many years after- 
wards, when the other three were dead, Swinburne 
celebrated this enchanting month at Vichy in a 
poem, called "Reminiscence," which, for some 
reason or other, he would never include in any one 
of his volumes. In it he describes 

hw bright the days [zvere] and how sweet their chime 
Rang, shone and passed in music that matched the dime 
Wherein we met rejoicing. 

He analyses of what the charm and what the 
radiance consisted, and he gives the first praise to 

The loyal grace, the courtesy bright as day. 

The strong sweet radiant spirit of lije and light 
k That shone and smiled and lightened on all men^s sight, 

\ The kindly life whose tune was the tune of May, 

in Leighton's conversation. Mrs. Sartoris was 
accustomed to sing for the three friends, with her 
incredible grace of vocalisation, and Swinburne 
describes how 

c 33 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



A woman'' s voice, divine as a bird^s by dawn 
Kindled and stirred to sunward, arose and held 

Our souls that heard, from earth as from sleep withdrawn^ 
And filled with light as stars, and as stars compelled 
To move by might of music. 

Finally, Burton's turn comes, 

warrior and wanderer, crowned 
With fame that shone from eastern on western day. 
More strong, more kind, than praise or than grief might say. 

It is much to be hoped that this very important 
biographical poem may find its place in the 
collections of Swinburne's works. It was written 
in 1890. 

While he was thus enjoying himself at Vichy, full 
of quiet happiness, he was lifted into the seventh 
heaven — ^* lit as a mountain lawn by morning," in 
his own words — through receiving a letter from 
Victor Hugo inviting him to stay with him at 
Hauteville House in Guernsey. Swinburne had 
sent the Master an article' of his on the newly- 
pubHshed novel L'Homme qui Rit." Victor Hugo 
wrote back " such a letter ! thanking me ex imo 
corde, as he says (as if he to whom we all owe such 
thanks could have anything to thank any one for !), 
and ending up with ^ Quand done me sera-t-il 
donne de vous voir ? ' " Swinburne immediately 
and gratefully replied, " In a month's time, in 
September " ; and on the same occasion he 
planned to spend not more than a week " in 
Paris, on his way from Vichy to Guernsey. He 
34 



SWINBURNE 

made arrangements to meet in Paris Paul de Saint- 
Victor, Theophile Gautier, " and perhaps Gustave 
Flaubert.'' Tu conviendras que cela veut bien la 
peine de s'arreter ?" he writes at the close of July. 
But of all this glittering anticipation, nothing, I 
think, was realised. There was never a meeting with 
Gautier and Flaubert, and none with Hugo till 
it was too late for happiness. Why did the bright 
scheme fall through ? I do not know ; but when 
Sir Richard Burton went eastward to Damascus, 
it seems certain that Swinburne came dully back 
to Etretat, and he was in London in October. 
He possessed that winter an unpublished poem, 

Les Enfants Pauvres," which Hugo had given him. 

He wrote little during these summer holidays on 
the Norman coast. But it may be of interest to 
record that the magnificent " Epilogue" to Songs 
before Sunrise," with its description of swimming 
at dawn, was composed at Etretat. The marvellous 
stanzas recording the sensations of the swimmer 
are a direct transcript of the ecstatic adventures in 
early morning hours from the plage outside the 
Porte d'Amont, or off the moorings of some 
indulgent and astonished fisherman. The poet's 
audacity in the waves was even sometimes alarming, 
as it had been twelve years before, when, as Miss 
Isabel Swinburne tells me, he insisted, in spite of the 
warning of the natives, upon plunging into the cold 
and dangerous waters of the Lac de Gaube, in the 
Pyrenees. 

There remains only to add that the episode which 

35 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

has been described on a previous page, in the 
course of which Swinburne so nearly lost his life, 
has left a direct mark on his poetry. It inspired 
Ex-Voto," a poem written at Etretat, but not 
published until eight years later, when it was 
included in Poems and Ballads, Second Series." 
I have the poet's own authority for stating this, and 
in particular for drawing attention to the fact that 
the following stanza (addressed, of course, to the 
sea) directly refers to his being nearly drowned : 

When thy salt lips well-nigh 
Sucked in my mouth'' s last sigh. 
Grudged I so much to die 

This death as others ? 
Was it no ease to think 
The chalice from whose brink 
Fate gave me death to drink 

Was thine — my Mother's ? 

When the Franco-German War broke out, 
Swinburne was Hngering at Etretat. He almost 
immediately returned to London, murmuring on the 
journey the strophes of an ode which he was 
already composing to the glory of a probable 
French Republic. He never, I believe, visited 
Etretat again. 

Ill 

The conversation of Swinburne, in the days of his 
youth and power, was very splendid in quality. No 
36 



SWINBURNE 

part of a great man disappears so completely as his 
table-talk, and of nothing is it more difficult after- 
wards to reconstruct an impression. Swinburne's 
conversation had, as was to be expected, some of 
the characteristics of his poetry. It was rapid, and 
yet not voluble ; it was measured, ornate, and pic- 
turesque, and yet it was in a sense homely. It was 
much less stilted and involved than his prose writing. 
His extreme natural politeness was always apparent 
in his talk, unless, of course, some unfortunate 
contretemps should rouse a sudden ebullition, when 
he could be neither just nor kind. But, as a rule, 
his courtesy shone out of his blue-grey eyes and was 
lighted up by the halo of his cloud of orange hair as 
he waved it, gravely or waggishly, at the company. 
The ease with which finished and polished sentences 
flowed from him was a constant amazement to me. 
I noted (January 1875) that somebody having been so 
unwise as to speak of the ^Haborious" versification 
of Catullus, Swinburne burst forth with a trumpet- 
note of scorn, and said, Well, I can only tell you 
I should have called him the least laborious, and the 
most spontaneous, in his god-like and bird-like 
melody, of all the lyrists known to me except Sappho 
and Shelley ; I should as soon call a lark's note 
laboured' as Catullus'." This might have been 
said of Swinburne's amazing talk ; it was a stream of 
song, no more laboured than a lark's. 

Immediately after leaving him I used sometimes, 
as well as I could, to note down a few of his 
sentences. It was not easy to retain much where 

37 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



all was so copious and rich, but a whole phrase or 
even colloquy would linger long in the memory. I 
think these brief reports may be trusted to give his 
exact words : nothing could recall his accent and 
the spontaneous crescendo effect of his enthusiasm. 
I quote from my note-books almost at random. 
This is in 1875, about some literary antagonist, but 
I have neglected to note whom : 

He had better be careful. If I am obliged " 
[very slowly] " to take the cudgel in my hand " [in 
rapid exultation] ^'the rafters of the hovel in which 
he skulks and sniggers shall ring with the loudest 
whacks ever administered in discipline or chastise- 
ment to a howling churl." All this poured forth, in 
towering high spirits, without a moment's pause to 
find a word. 

Often Swinburne would put on the ironical stop, 
and, with a killing air of mock modesty, would say, 
^' I don't know whether you can reasonably expect 
me to be very much weaker than a tame rabbit" ; or 

Even milk would boil over twice to be treated in 
that way." 

He was certainly, during the years in which I 
knew him well, at his best in 1875. Many of the 
finest things which I tried to capture belonged 
to that year. Here is an instance of his proud 
humility : 

It is always a thorn in my flesh, and a check to 
any satisfaction which I might feel in writing prose, 
to reflect that probably I have never written, nor 
shall ever write, one single page that Landor would 

38 



SWINBURNE 

have deigned to sign. Nothing of this sort, or indeed 
of any sort whatever, troubles me for a moment when 
writing verse, but this always does haunt me when 
I am at work on prose." 

Before 1875 he had become considerably severed 
from Rossetti in sympathy, and he was prepared to 
discuss without anger the possibility that his praise 
had been over-luscious : 

'^Well, very likely 1 did say some extravagant 
things about Rossetti's original sonnets and lyrics, 
but I do deliberately stick to any word I said about 
him as a translator. No doubt Shelley is to the full 
as beautiful a workman in that line, but then he is 
as inaccurate as Rossetti is accurate." 

All through this year, 1875, his mind was full of 
the idea of translating ^schylus, Aristophanes, 
Villon, all his peculiar foreign favourites, and the 
subject was frequently uppermost in his mouth. 
He thought Mallarme's version of Poe ''very 
exquisite," although he could not make much 
of Manet's amazing tolio illustrations. Swinburne 
was well disposed, however, to Manet, whose studio 
in Paris he told me he had visited in 1863, in com- 
pany with Whistler and Fantin. He was much 
disappointed at the sudden death of Maggi, of Milan 
who had undertaken to bring out a complete Italian 
translation of his poems. Swinburne used to speak 
of Italy as ''my second mother-country" and "my 
country by adoption," although I think his only 
personal knowledge of it had been gained in 1863, 
when he spent a long time in and near Florence, 

39 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



much of the time in the society of Walter Savage 
Landor and that " dear, brilHant, ingenious creature," 
Mrs. Gaskell. It was in a garden at Fiesole, he told 
me, that he wrote " Itylus," with the whole air 
vociferous with nightingales around him. 

In the summer of 1875 I brought him a very 
laudatory review of his writings which had just 
appeared in Copenhagen, and urged him to gratify 
the Danish critic by sending him a few written words 
of acknowledgment. This he was very well pleased 
to do, but he paused, with lifted pen, and looking 
up sideways with that curious roguish smile which 
was one of his charms, he asked, " But what in the 
name of all the gods and little fishes of Scandinavia 
am I to say ? I know ! I must borrow some of the 
divine daring which enables our Master to respond 
so frankly to tributes of which he cannot read a 
word ! I will write to your Danish friend exactly as 
Victor Hugo replies to such tributes of English verse 
and prose I" 

The first letter, he told me, which he received 
from Victor Hugo, of whom he always spoke in 
terms of idolatrous reverence, was dated in the early 
part of 1862, in acknowledgment of some unsigned 
articles on " Les Miserables." In replying, with the 
greatest effusion, Swinburne asked leave to lay the 
dedication of ^' Chastelard " at Hugo's feet. Although 
the English poet always spoke of the French poet as 
a daughter might speak of her mother, with tender 
adoration, they did not meet until November 1882, 
when Swinburne went over to Paris on purpose to 
40 



SWINBURNE 

attend the revival — " the resurrection," he called it 
— of " Le Roi s'amuse." He had no familiarity with 
Paris ; he stayed, like a true British tourist, in one 
of the fashionable hotels in the Rue St. Honore. 
On that occasion, and I think for the only time in 
his life, he pressed the hand of Victor Hugo. He 
wrote to me from Paris of the play, and of the fiftieth 
anniversary of its appearance, "a thing as unique 
and wonderful as the play itself," but said not a word 
of his impressions of Hugo. 

To some one who remarked that it was disagree- 
able to be controverted, Swinburne replied gravely, 
" No ! not at all ! It gives a zest to the expression 
of sympathy to raise some points of amicable dis- 
agreement." This was not the only case in which 
I was struck by a certain unconscious resemblance 
between his repartees and those of Dr. Johnson. 

Early in life he started his theory of the division 
of great writers into gods and giants. He worked 
it out rather whimsically ; Shakespeare, of course, 
was a god, and Ben Jonson was a giant, but I 
think that Webster was a god. These conjectures 
led him along the pleasant pathway of caprice. 
He now started his serious study of Shakespeare, 
of which, as about to become a book, I believe he 
first spoke to me late in 1873. It was a time of con- 
troversy so acrid that we can hardly realise the 
bitterness of it in these calm days. But Swinburne 
was more than ready for the fight. He rejoiced in 
his power to make his assailants ridiculous. "I 
need hardly tell you," he said to me, " that I shall 

41 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



begin, and clear my way, with a massacre of the 
pedants worthy of one of Topsy's [William Morris's] 
Icelandic sagas. It shall be 'a murder grim and 
great,' I pledge myself to you ! " And indeed he 
was very vivacious at the expense of the New Shak- 
spere (or " Shack-spur," as he always pronounced it) 
Society. 

Great anger burned in his bosom because the 
Athenceum described his Erechtheus " as " a transla- 
tion from Euripides." I never clearly understood 
the reason of Swinburne's fanatical objection to 
Euripides, which has even puzzled Dr. Verrall. He 
must have adopted it, I think, from Jowett. On the 
occasion of the appearance of the review quoted 
above, I found Swinburne in a fine fit of the tantrums. 
He poured out his indignation the moment I came 
into the room. " Translation from Euripides, indeed ! 
Why, a fourth-form boy could perceive that, as far as 

Erechtheus " can be said to be formed after any- 
body it is modelled throughout on the earlier style of 
^schylus, the simple three-parts-epic style of ' The 
Suppliants,' ' The Persians,' and the * Seven against 
Thebes,' the style most radically contrary to the 
* droppings,' grrh ! the droppings (as our divine and 
dearest Mrs. Browning so aptly rather than delicately 
puts it) of the scenic sophist that can be conceived. 
I should very much like to see the play of Euripides 
which contains five hundred consecutive lines that 
could be set against as many of mine ! " 

Again, on a later occasion, ^* I always have main- 
tained, and I always shall maintain, that it is infi- 
42 



SWINBURNE 

nitely easier to overtop Euripides by the head and 
shoulders than to come up to the waist of Sophocles 
or stretch up to touch the lance of ^schylus." 

Erechtheus" was written with unusual celerity, all 
of it, if I remember right, in lodgings by the sea at 
Wragford, near Southwold, in Suffolk, where Swin- 
burne was staying in the autumn of 1875. When 
we think of the learning, the weight of imagination, 
and the unrivalled metrical daring of that splendid 
drama (to my mind on the very highest level of 
Swinburne's poetical achievement), this improvisa- 
tion seems marvellous. 

To one who praised in his presence the two great 
naval odes of Campbell : I like to hear you say 
that. But I should speak still more passionately, 
for the simple fact is that I know nothing like them 
at all, simile aut secundum, in their own line, which 
is one of the very highest lines in the highest range 
of poetry. Very little national verse anywhere is 
good either patriotically or poetically ; and what is 
good patriotically is far inferior to Campbell 
poetically. Look at Burns and Rouget de I'lsle! 
What is virtually lacking is proof, in the face of the 
Philistines, that poetry has real worth and weight in 
national matters — lacking everywhere else, only — 
not lacking in Campbell." 

His feeling about literature was serious to the 
verge of fanaticism. It absorbed him like a 
religion, and it was this unflagging sense of the 
superhuman power and value of poetry which made 
his conversation so stimulating, especially to a very 

43 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



young man whom he honoured with the untram- 
melled expression of his opinions. But he had 
a charming delicacy of toleration for the feelings of 
those whom he respected, even when he believed 
them to be tainted with error. Of an elder writer 
of some authority, to whom he was urged to reply 
on a point of criticism, he said, "No ! If I wrote 
about what he has said, I could not hold myself in. 

I do not wish to be rude to . Now, I know 

that I should begin by trying to behave like a good 
boy, and before I knew what I was doing I should 

be smiting hip and thigh, and making him 

as the princes were who perished at Endor. I hope 
you remember what they became ? Look it up, and 
you will find what becomes of poeticules when they 
decompose into criticasters ! So, you see, I had 
better leave him alone." 

Swinburne's pleasure in fighting was a very 
marked and a very amusing trait in his conversa- 
tion. He liked, at brief intervals, to have something 
to worry between the teeth of his discourse. He 
would allow himself to be drawn off the scent 
by any red herring of criticism. This mock 
irascibility, as of a miniature Boythorn, always 
struck me as having been deliberately modelled on 
the behaviour of Walter Savage Landor. This im- 
pression was confirmed in rather a startling way by 
a phrase of Swinburne's own. He had been 
reading to me the MS. of his "George Chapman," 
and after the reading was over, and we had passed 
to other things, Swinburne said, " Did you notice 
44 



SWINBURNE 

just now some pages of rather Landorian character? 
Don't you think I was rather like the old lion, when 
he was using his teeth and claws, in my rending of 
the stage licensers and our crazy English censorial 
system ? " 

The intellectual temperament of Swinburne is 
not to be apprehended unless we remember that he 
was in grain an aristocrat. On the father's side he 
was directly descended from a feudal Border 
family, which, as long ago as the reign of 
Edward II., had produced a man of mark in Sir 
Adam de Swinburne. The poet never forgot the 
ancestral castle of Swinburne, which had passed 
from his forbears two centuries ago, never the 
fierce feuds and rattling skirmishes under the hard 
Northumbrian sky. He talked with freedom and 
with manifest pleasure of these vague mediaeval 
forefathers, of their bargaining and fighting with 
the Umfrevilles and the Fenwicks ; of the un- 
speakable charm of their fastness at Capheaton, 
where so much of his own childhood was passed. 
But his interest in the Swinburnes seemed to be 
largely romantic and antiquarian. His connections 
on his mother's side were not less distinguished, nor 
were they less ancient, although the Ashburnhams 
were ennobled by William III., and their immediate 
founder had been a loyal groom of the bedchamber 
to Charles I. The poet's interest in their history, 
however, began at the point where Lady Jane 

45 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



Ashburnham married Admiral Charles Swinburne 
in 1836, Algernon being born next year as their 
eldest son. He was not indisposed, however, in 
unemphatic retrospect, to recall the great houses of 
Ormonde, Anglesey, and Northumberland with 
which the blood of his mother brought him into 
direct connection. Probably a reminiscence of all 
this may occasionally be found to throw light on 
some otherwise cryptic lines in his poetry. 

Of all his relatives, however, he spoke in those 
days most of two : his incomparable mother, 
invincible in tenderness and anxious care, and his 
somewhat formidable uncle, the fourth Earl. This 
nobleman was a book-collector of the fearless old 
fashion, who had formed, at a reckless cost, one of 
the noblest libraries in England. Lord Ashburn- 
ham did not welcome visitors to his bookshelves, 
but he made a special, perhaps a unique, exception 
in favour of his nephew. Some of Swinburne's 
happiest days were spent among the almost 
fabulous treasures of the great house near Battle, 
and he would return to London with dazzled eyes, 
babbling of illuminated breviaries and old MS. 
romances in Burgundian French. There can be no 
doubt that Lord Ashburnham was one of the very 
few persons, if he was not the only one, of whom 
his nephew stood in awe. If the poet was fractious, 
the peer could be tumultuous, and I have been told 
that nowhere was Algernon so primly on his p's 
and q's " as at Ashburnham. But a real affec- 
tionate appreciation existed between the old biblio- 

46 



SWINBURNE 

phile and the glowing young poet. When LordAsh- 
burnham died, over eighty, in 1878, it was with sorrow 
as well as respect that his nephew mourned him. 

Outside poetry, and, in lesser measure, his family 
life, Swinburne's interests were curiously limited. 
He had no " small talk," and during the discussion 
of the common topics of the day his attention at 
once flagged and fell off, the glazed eye betraying 
that the mind was far away. For science he had 
no taste whatever, and his lack of musical ear 
was a byword among his acquaintances. I once 
witnessed a practical joke played upon him, which 
made me indignant at the time, but which now seems 
innocent enough, and not without interest. A lady, 
having taken the rest of the company into her con- 
fidence, told Swinburne that she would render on the 
piano a very ancient Florentine ritornello which had 
just been discovered. She then played *^ Three Blind 
Mice," and Swinburne was enchanted. He found 
that it reflected to perfection the cruel beauty of the 
Medicis — which perhaps it does. But this exemplifies 
the fact that all impressions with him were intel- 
lectual, and that an appeal to his imagination would 
gild the most common object with romance. 

In the days I speak of, Swinburne lived in large, 
rather empty rooms on the first floor of an old 
house in Great James Street, which used to remind 
me of one of Dickens's London houses in Great 
Expectations" or Little Dorrit." But until the 
death of his father, who died at a great age in the early 
autumn of 1877, Swinburne always had a country 

47 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



home in Holmwood, near Henley-on-Thames. At 
Admiral Swinburne's death I think he stayed on 
with his mother at Holmwood till the end of that 
year. Such months on the banks of the Thames 
were always beneficial to his health, and he wrote 
there without interruption. I find a note (1875) : 
How exuberant S. always is when he comes 
back ; it is partly pleasure at being in London 
again, and partly refreshment from his country 
captivity." Of his visits to the sea-coast of Norfolk 
and Suffolk others must speak, for I never had the 
pleasure of accompanying him. 

When he came back from the country to town 
he was always particularly anxious to recite or read 
aloud his own poems. In doing this he often be- 
came very much excited, and even, in his over- 
whelming sense of the movement of the metre, 
would jump about the room in a manner some- 
what embarrassing to the listener. His method of 
procedure was uniform. He would arrive at a 
friend's house with a breast-pocket obviously bulg- 
ing with manuscript, but buttoned across his chest. 
After floating about the room and greeting his host 
and hostess with many little becks of the head, and 
affectionate smiles, and light wavings of the fingers, 
he would settle at last upright on a chair, or, by 
preference, on a sofa, and sit there in a state of 
rigid immobility, the toe of one foot pressed against 
the heel of the other. Then he would say, in an 
airy, detached way, as though speaking of some 
absent person, "I have brought with me my 

48 



SWINBURNE 



* Thalassius ' or my ' Wasted Garden ' (or whatever 
it might happen to be), which I have just finished." 
Then he would be folded again in silence, looking 
at nothing. We then were to say, " Oh, do please 
read it to us ! Will you ? " Swinburne would 
promptly reply, I had no intention in the world 

of boring you with it, but since you ask me and 

out would come the MS. I do not remember that 
there was ever any variation in this little ceremony, 
which sometimes preluded many hours of recitation 
and reading. His delivery, especially of his own 
poetry, was delightful as long as he sat quietly in his 
seat. His voice, which was of extraordinary beauty, 
the pure Ashburnham voice," as his cousin explains 
to me, rose and fell monotonously, but with a flute- 
like note which was very agreeable, and the pulse of 
the rhythm was strongly yet delicately felt. I shall 
never forget the successive evenings on which he 
read Both well" aloud in his lodgings, in parti- 
cular one on which Edward Burne-Jones, Arthur 
O'Shaughnessy, P. B. Marston, and I sat with him 
at his round marble-topped table — lighted only by 
candles in two giant candlesticks of serpentine he 
had brought from the Lizard — and heard him read 
the magnificent second act of that tragedy. He 
surpassed himself in vigour and melody of utter- 
ance that night. But sometimes, in reading, he 
lost control of his emotions, the sound became a 
scream, and he would dance about the room, the 
paper fluttering from his finger-tips like a pennon 
in a gale of wind. 

D 49 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

He was not, in my recollection, very ready to 
recite old published poems of his own, though 
always glad, and even imperiously anxious, to read 
new ones. Almost the only exception which I re- 
member was in favour of The Triumph of Time," 
a poem which Swinburne deliberately impressed 
upon me, and doubtless upon other friends as well, 
as being, in a very peculiar sense, a record of per- 
sonal experience. It was always difficult to know 
where the frontier ran between hard fact and Swin- 
burne's mind illuminated by a sweeping limelight 
of imagination. He had a real love of truth, but 
no certain recognition of fact. Unless, however, 
he curiously deceived himself, a set of very definite 
emotions and events is embalmed in The Triumph 
of Time," of which I have more than once heard 
him chant fragments with extraordinary poignancy. 
On these occasions his voice took on strange and 
fife-like notes, extremely moving and disconcerting, 
since he was visibly moved himself. The sound of 
Swinburne wailing forth in his thrilling semitones 
such stanzas as that addressed to the Sea : 

/ shall sleep, and move with the moving ships. 
Change as the winds change, veer in the tide ; 

My lips will feast on the foam of thy lips, 

I shall rise with thy rising, with thee subside ; 

Sleep, and not know if she be, if she were. 

Filled full with life to the eyes and hair. 

As a rose J s fulfilled to the rose leaf tips 

With splendid summer and perfume and pride, 

50 



SWINBURNE 

is something which will not fade out of memory as 
long as life lasts ; and, perhaps, most of all, in the 
recitation of the last four of the following very 
wonderful verses: 

/ shdll go my ways, tread out my measurCy 

Fill the days of my daily breath 
With fugitive things not good to treasure. 

Do as the world doth, say as it saith ; 
But if we had loved each other — O sweet. 
Had you felt, lying under the palms of your feet. 
The heart of my heart, beating harder with pleasure 

To feel you tread it to dust and death, 

Swinburne seemed to achieve, or to go far towards 
achieving, an entirely novel and original form of 
expression. His whole body shook with passion, 
his head hung on one side with the eyes uplifted, 
his tongue seemed burdened by the weight of the 
syllables, and in the concentrated emphasis of his 
slow utterance he achieved something like the real 
Delphic ecstasy, the transfiguration of the Pythia 
quivering on her tripod. It was surpassingly strange, 
but it was without a touch of conscious oddity or 
affectation. It was a case of poetic " possession," 
pure and simple. 

V 

Swinburne was a prodigious worker, and the bulk of 
liis productions in prose and verse is the more surpris- 
ing since the act of writing was extremely disagreeable 
to him, as, we may remember, it was to Wordsworth, 

51 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

He should have been born an improvisatore. I 
brought him once a picture of the Swedish poet Bell- 
mann, whose genius (a hundred years earlier) had a 
certain resemblance to his own. Bellmann was repre- 
sented with a lute, improvising his verses in the open 
air. " Ah ! " said Swinburne, " that is what I should 
like to do 1 I should like to stand on a promontory 
in Sark, in the full blaze of the sun, and shout my 
verses till all the gulls come fawning to my feet» 
That would be better than scraping and spluttering 
over a filthy pen." In spite of a real physical 
difficulty in writing, however, Swinburne got through 
an astonishing amount. In the autumn of 1874, for 
instance, I find he was finishing Bothwell " ; he 
was preparing a volume of essays for the press ; he 
was composing lyrics for a volume to be called 
^' Songs in Time of Change," and then Poems of 
Revolution " (ultimately, I suppose, " Songs of Two 
Nations ") ; he was writing criticism of Poe and 
Blake (which did not, I think, please him enough to 
be printed) ; he was busy with a book about 
Chapman ; and he was engaged on a revival of 
Wells's " Joseph and His Brethren." In connection 
with the last-mentioned, I remember his showing me 
the recast he was making of an essay on Wells he 
had written in 1861, and he said, "At all events, I 
can write better prose now than I could then." 

The habit of centenaries had not seized the 
British public forty years ago. The anniversary of 
Landor's birth passed quite unobserved, and even 
Swinburne did not recollect the date till the day 
52 



SWINBURNE 

itself, when he was at Holmwood, and could do 
nothing. He was extremely vexed ; oddly enough, 
he had always believed Land or to be two or three 
years older than he was, and he had taken for 
granted that the centenary had passed. However, 
it providentially transpired that Charles Lamb was 
born only eleven days later than Landor, so on 
February i, 1875, Swinburne came up to town, 
with delightful fussiness, on purpose to organise a 
Lamb dinner. So far as I know, it was the only time in 
his life that he ever organised " anything. He was 
magnificent ; very grave and important ; and he 
smoothed over the awkward circumstance of his 
having forgotten (for the moment) his own beloved 
Landor by saying that the same libations might fitly 
and gracefully be mingled in an affectionate remem- 
brance of the two great men. 

Landor, however, was ultimately merged in Lamb, 
in whose honour a very small group ate a mediocre 
dinner in a Soho tavern on February 10. We 
were only five, if I recollect rightly, the others 
being Mr. Theodore Watts, our ardent and sanguine 
William Minto (whose bright life burned out untimely 
some nineteen years ago), and a curious friend of 
Swinburne's, Thomas Purnell, always to me rather a 
disturbing element. Swinburne was in the chair, and 
I never saw him in better ^'form." He took upon 
himself an air of dignity which presupposed the 
idea that our little banquet was, symbolically, a 
large public affair ; and when Purnell " went too 
far," as people say, it was wonderful to hear 

53 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



Swinburne recall him to a more decorous choice of 
language. I feel as if there had been speeches " ; 
but that is merely caused by a recollection of the 
very high grade along which the conversation moved 
until the waiters turned us out into the street. 

Of the relations between Swinburne and Brown- 
ing something should, I believe, be put on record. 
In the earliest times the former had shared the 
Pre-RaphaeUte enthusiasm for what Browning had 
published up to " Men and Women." But the two 
poets came into no close contact, and I think that 
Swinburne's natural instinct was not attracted to 
Browning's personality. When, in 1874, I began 
eagerly to talk of the elder to the younger poet, my 
zeal was checked by Swinburne's courteous indiffer- 
ence. He found no pleasure whatever in Browning's 
plays, nor much, which astonished me, in his lyrics. 
Yet there was no aversion, and when we came to 
^^The Ring and the Book" Swinburne's praise was 
unaffected. Moreover, he more and more warmly 
admired the series of psychological studies beginning 
with " Fifine at the Fair." *^This," he said, " is far 
better than anything Browning has yet written. 
Here is his true province." The result of this deve- 
lopment of taste was the page of almost extravagant 
laudation in the George Chapman " of 1875, which 
amazed some of Swinburne's friends, and bewildered 
Browning himself as much as it gratified him. But, 
unfortunately, in 1877, at the height of Swin- 
burne's violent controversy with the New Shakspere 
Society, Browning accepted the presidency of that 
54 



SWINBURNE 

body. This gave Swinburne not merely deep 
offence, but great and lasting pain, and no invectives 
became too sharp for him in speaking of Browning. 
It distressed me beyond measure that such a mis- 
understanding should exist between men whom. I 
loved and venerated, and I ventured to tell Brown- 
ing how much Swinburne was hurt. He was, of 
course, entirely innocent of all intentional offence, 
expressed himself shocked, and begged me to explain 
to Swinburne how little any intention of slighting 
him had crossed his mind. At the same time, for my 
private ear. Browning suggested that one's conduct 
really could not be regulated by the dread lest some 
eminent person one scarcely knew might disapprove 
of it. I did what I could, not without some success, 
to moderate Swinburne's anger, but the damage was 
done. There was a native incompatibility between 
the two poets which prevented either of them from 
according complete justice to the other. The 
character of Browning had the breadth of a lake, 
which is sometimes swept by storms ; that of Swin- 
burne, the unceasing impetuosity of a mountain 
torrent. 

Before his fortieth year there had set in a curious 
ossification of Swinburne's intellect. He ceased to 
form new impressions, while reverting with all his 
former exuberance to the old. This was extraordi- 
nary in one who had waved the banner of rebellion 
and had led youthful enthusiasm so heroically when 
it affected writers just earlier than himself. Whether 
he changed his tone in familiar talk later on I do not 

55 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



know, but certainly between 1874 and 1884 he showed 
no intelligent comprehension whatever of the new 
elements in literature. He was absolutely indifferent 
to Stevenson, to Ibsen, to Dostoieffsky, each of 
whom was pressed upon his notice, and his hostility 
to Zola was grotesque. In 1877 L'Assommoir " 
was published periodically in a Paris review called, 
I think. La Repuhlique des Letires, a journal which 
had languished from the first, and now expired in its 
third volume. Swinburne attributed, of course 
jocosely, the fact of its failure to the effect of a most 
dignified protest against Zola which he had printed 
somewhere. I remember his ecstasy, and his ex- 
pression of a belief (which proved quite unfounded) 
that Zola would never dare to publish another page. 

This attitude to the French Naturalists was 
unusual. Swinburne's native temper was generous, 
and the idea of attacking a genuine talent of any 
species would have been dreadful to him. But he 
did not think that Stevenson — to take a particularly 
distressing instance — had any talent, and he was 
therefore silent about what he wrote. It was curious, 
however, to note that Swinburne was always capable 
of being affected along straight lines of reminiscence. 
At the very moment when he was hewing at the 
French realists, root and branch, he spoke to me with 
generous approval of one of the least gifted and most 
extreme of their precursors, Leon Cladel. I was 
greatly astonished, but the mystery was soon ex- 
plained. Cladel had attacked Napoleon III. with 
peculiar virulence, and he was an open worshipper at 

56 



SWINBURNE 

the altar of Victor Hugo. No matter how Zolaesque 
his stories might be, he had these two unquestionable 
claims on Swinburne's approbation. 

There is no doubt that a wonderful aura of charm 
hung about the person of this astonishing man of 
genius. Swinburne might be absurd ; he could 
not fail to be distinguished. He might be quixotic ; 
he was never mean or timid or dull. He repre- 
sented, in its most flamboyant shape, revolt against 
the concessions and the hypocrisies of the mid- 
Victorian era, this ghastly, thin-faced time of ours." 
An extraordinary exhilaration accompanied his pres- 
ence, something uplifted, extravagant, and yet un- 
selfish. No one has ever lived who loved poetry 
more passionately, found in it more inexhaustible 
sources of pleasure, cultivated it more thoroughly 
for itself, more sincerely for nothing which it 
might be persuaded to offer as a side issue. 
Half Swinburne's literary influence depended 
upon little, unregarded matters, such as his 
unflinching attitude of worship towards the great 
masters, his devotion to unpopular causes, his 
uncompromising arrogance in the face of conven- 
tionality. It is becoming difficult to recapture even 
the thrill he caused by his magic use of " unpoetic " 
monosyllables, such as bloat," pinch," "rind," 
*^fang," "wince," embedded in the very heart of 
his ornate melody. But his meteoric flight across 
the literary heavens, followed by the slow and 
dignified descent of the glimmering shower of 
sparks, will long excite curiosity, even when the 

57 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



sensation it caused has ceased to be quite intelligible. 
Yet those who stood under the apparition, and stared 
in amazement at its magnificent audacity, must not 
be over-much surprised if a generation is arising 
that fails to comprehend what the phenomenon 
meant to the original spectators. 

1909-12. 



J8 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

1 8 16-1902 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 



At the opening of the year 1902 there were still 
alive amongst us two men who survived as repre- 
sentatives of what poetry was in these islands before 
the commencement of the Victorian era. Mr. 
Aubrey de Vere, having reached his eighty-ninth 
year, passed away on January 20 ; Mr. Philip James 
Bailey, in his eighty-seventh, on September 7. So, 
as we sit quietly and watch, we see history un- 
rolling, since, in the chronicle of our literature, 
the closure of a great and complicated system of 
poetic activity was, in a sense, defined by the deaths 
of these venerable men. Moreover — and this is 
curious — in each of these survivors we had, living 
before us, types — not quite of the first order, indeed,, 
but yet vivid types — of the two main divisions of 
the English poetry of the first half of the nineteenth 
century : that, namely, which was devoted to a 
reasonable grace, and that which was uplifted on 
a mystical enthusiasm. So that a sermon on the 
verse of that time might well take as its text the 
opposed and yet related names of De Vere and 
Bailey. 

Nothing so extensive is to be attempted here. 
But before endeavouring to define the character of 

61 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



the talent of the younger of these veterans, and 
to note the place of Festus " in the history of 
letters, we may linger a moment on what re- 
semblance there was between the two aged men, 
so intensely opposed in their general disposition 
of mind and their walk in the world. They had 
in common an exquisite personal dignity, Mr. de 
Vere moving in the genial companionship of like- 
minded friends, both in Ireland and in London ; 
Mr. Bailey immobile in his hermitage at Notting- 
ham. They had in common the happy fate which 
preserved to each in extreme old age all the 
faculties of the mind, the sweetest cheerfulness, 
the most ardent hopefulness, an optimism that 
nothing could assail and that disease itself avoided. 
Each, above all, to a very remarkable degree, pre- 
served to the last his religious devotion to that art 
to which his life had been dedicated ; each to the 
very end was full of a passionate love of verse. 
Song-intoxicated men they were, both of them ; 
preserving their delight in poetry far beyond the 
common limits of an exhilaration in any mental 
matter. 

When this has been said, it is the difference far 
more than the resemblance between them which 
must strike the memory. Of the imaginative op- 
position which the author of " Festus " offered 
to the entire school of which Mr. de Vere was 
a secondary ornament more will be said later. 
But the physical opposition was immense between 
the slightness of figure and flexible elegance of the 
62 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

Irish poet, with his mundane mobihty, and the 
statehness of Mr. Bailey. Mr. de Vere never 
seemed to be an old man, but a young man dried 
up ; Mr. Bailey, of whose appearance my recollec- 
tions go back at least thirty years, always during 
that time looked robustly aged, a sort of prophet 
or bard, with a cloud of voluminous white hair 
and curled silver beard. As the years went by 
his head seemed merely to grow more handsome, 
almost absurdly, almost irritatingly so, like a picture 
of Connal, first of mortal men," in some illustrated 
edition of Ossian. The extraordinary suspension 
of his gaze, his gentle, dazzling aspect of uninter- 
rupted meditation, combined with a curious down- 
ward arching of the lips, seen through the white 
rivers of his beard, to give a distinctly vatic 
impression. He had an attitude of arrested in- 
spiration, as if waiting for the heavenly spark to 
fall again, as it had descended from 1836 to 1839, 
and as it seemed never inclined to descend again. 
But the beauty of Mr. Bailey's presence, which 
was so marked as to be an element that cannot be 
overlooked in a survey of vi^hat he was, had an 
imperfection in its very perfectness. It lacked fire. 
What the faces of Milton and Keats possessed, 
what we remember in the extraordinary features of 
Tennyson, just this was missing in Mr. Bailey, who, 
nevertheless, might have sat to any scene-painter 
in Christendom as the type of a Poet. 



63 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



I 

English literature in the reign of William IV, 
is a subject which has hitherto failed to attract a 
historian. It forms a small belt or streak of the 
most colourless, drawn across our variegated in- 
tellectual chronicle. The romantic movement of 
the end of the preceding century had gradually 
faded into emotional apathy by 1830, and the years 
which England spent under the most undignified 
and inefficient of her monarchs were few indeed, 
but highly prosaic. Most of the mental energy 
of the time went out in a constitutional struggle 
which was necessary, but was not splendid. A 
man is hardly at his best when his own street-door 
has been slammed in his face, and he stands outside 
stamping his feet and pulling the bell. The decade 
which preceded the accession of Victoria was, in 
literature, a period of cold reason : the best that 
could be said of the popular authors was that 
they were sensible. A curious complacency marked 
the age, a self-sufficiency which expressed itself in 
extraordinarily unemotional writing. To appreciate 
the heavy and verbose deadness of average English 
prose in the thirties we must dip into the books then 
popular. No volume of the essay class was so 
much in vogue as the " Lacon " of the Rev. Mr. 
Colton, a work the aridity of which can only be 
comprehended by those who at this date have the 
courage to attack it. Mr. Colton, although he 
preached the loftiest morality, was a gambling 

64 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

parson, and shot himself, in 1832, in the Forest 
of Fontainebleau. But that did not affect the 
popularity of his chain of dusty apophthegms. 

The starvation of the higher faculties of the mind 
in the William IV. period was something which we 
fail to-day to realise. No wonder Carlyle thought, 
in 1835, ^^^t ^'Providence warns me to have done 
with literature," and in 1837 saw nothing for it but 
to buy a rifle and a spade, and withdraw to the 
Transatlantic wilderness." In the letters of Tennyson 
we may easily read what it was that, after the 
failure of his enchanting volumes of 1830 and 1833, 
kept him silent in despair for ten of his best years. 
This was the dead lull during which the moral 
storms of 1840-1850 were preparing to gather. It 
was the time w^hen the Puseyite controversy was 
beginning, when Tracts for the Times," under an 
oppressive obloquy and miscomprehension, were 
making a struggle for religious warmth and air. A 
chilly light of reason applied to morals, that was 
what the subjects of William IV. desired to 
contemplate, and poetry itself was called upon to 
make a definite concession to the gospel of utility. 
Romance was at its lowest ebb, and even — 

the ghost ofMiltiades rose by night 
And stood by the bed of the Benthamite. 

Among poets who possessed the public ear at that 
time, the aged Wordsworth stood first, but the 
prestige of the laureate, Southey, who had been one 
of the most active and authoritative of reviewers, 

E 65 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



was, in many circles, paramount. Now Southey — 
as his most prominent disciple, Sir Henry Taylor, 
has proudly told us — " took no pleasure in poetic 
passion." By the time of which we are speaking, 
however, Southey and even Wordsworth had passed 
into the background of active life, but there had 
been no reaction against the quietism of their later 
days. That quietism had taken possession of the 
taste of the country, and had gradually ousted the 
only serious rival it had seemed to possess, the 
violence of Byron. It was at this time, in the full 
tide of Benthamism, that Henry Taylor attempted a 
poetical coup d'etat which demands close attention 
from the student of our literary history. 

In publishing his enormous drama of Philip van 
Artevelde," in 1834, Henry Taylor took occasion to 
issue a preface which is now far more interesting to 
read than his graceful verse. He thought the time 
had come to stamp out what he called ^^the mere 
luxuries of poetry." He was greatly encouraged by 
the general taste of the public, which obviously 
was finding highly-coloured literature inacceptable, 
and in a preface of singular boldness, not unadroit 
in its logic, Taylor presumed to dictate terms to the 
poets. He begged them, for the future, to walk the 
common earth and breathe the common air. He 
entreated them to believe that forcible expression, 
fervid feeHng, and beautiful imagery are useless if 
employed in connection with thoughts that are 
not sound." There was to be no health for us 
unless reason had full supremacy over imagination. 
66 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

Reflection must take the place of mere ''feeling," 
thought the place of imagery. Passion, so this 
faithful disciple of Southey thought, was to be 
regarded as a direct danger and disadvantage. 

Nor did the preface of 1834 confine itself to the 
encouragement of what was tame and good ; it 
descended into the dust, and wrestled with lions 
that were wild and bad. It fought with Byron, as 
Christian fought with Apollyon, conscious of the 
awful strength of its supernatural opponent. It 
fought less strenuously, and w^ith a touch of contempt, 
with " the brilliant Mr. Shelley," to whom it could 
afford to be condescending. It glanced round the 
arena without being able so much as to observe an 
antagonist who, to our eyes, fills the picture, and is 
alone sufficient to condemn all the " Philip van 
Artevelde " arguments and theories. This is Keats, 
of whom, so far as we can discover from this 
preface, Taylor had, in 1834, never even heard, or 
else despised so entirely that it did not occur to him 
to mention his name. 

The Preface to Philip van Artevelde" enjoyed a 
great success. Its assumptions were accepted by 
the reviewers as poetic canon law. It was admitted 
without reserve that the function of poetry was to 
infer and to instruct." The poets were warned 
to occupy themselves in future mainly with what 
was rational and plain. Henry Taylor had made 
the sweeping charge that the more enthusiastic 
species of verse was apt to encourage attention by 
fixing it on what is "puerile, pusillanimous, or 

67 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



wicked." There was a great searching of heart in 
families ; the newspapers were immense. A large 
number of copies of ^^Childe Harold" and of 
" Manfred " were confiscated, and examples of 
Pollok's " Course of Time " (by many persons 
preferred to Paradise Lost," as of a purer 
orthodoxy) were substituted for them. Even the 
young Macaulay, who had suddenly become a 
power, joined the enemy, and declared that " perhaps 
no person can be a poet, or can ever enjoy poetry, 
without a certain unsoundness of mind." Ah, but, 
cries in effect the excellent Henry Taylor, we will so 
coerce and browbeat and depress the poets that 
they shall not think a thought or write a line that is 
not " sound," and the Benthamite himself (the 
stupendous original Jeremy had died, of course, in 
1832) shall pluck, unhandily enough, at the lyre 
now consecrated to utility and decorum. 

It was the old balance between "stasy" and 
^^ec-stasy," and Henry Taylor was, to a certain 
extent, justified by the character of such contempo- 
rary works as might be held to belong to the ecstatic 
species. It did not seem a moment at which great 
subjects and a great style were prepared to commend 
themselves. The most prominent indulgers in 
^'the mere luxury of poetry" were Heraud and 
Reade, whose efforts were calculated to bring instant 
ridicule upon imaginative writing by their hollow 
grandiloquencej. There were the Byronisms of 
Croly, the once-famous author of that gorgeous 
romance, ^* Salathiel," and ttiere was the never- 
68 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

to-be-forgotten Robert Montgomery. All these 
poetasters merely emphasised and justified Henry 
Taylor's protest. In genuine poetry of a highly 
imaginative cast there appeared, almost wholly 
unregarded, PauHne " and Paracelsus," and in 
1838 Miss Barrett produced, in defiance of the 
taste of the age, her irregular and impassioned 
" Seraphim." None of these publications, however, 
disturbed in the least degree the supremacy of the 
school of good sense, or threatened that " equipoise 
of reason " which the disciples of Southey thought 
that they had fixed for ever. Poetry was to preserve 
its logical judgment ; it was never to let itself go." 
The cardinal importance of Bailey's "Festus" is 
that it was the earliest direct counterblast to this 
scheme of imaginative discipline, and that when it 
appeared in 1839 walls built up by Henry 
Taylor's arrogant preface immediately began to 
crumble down. 

II 

The extraordinary poem which thus recalled 
English literature to the ecstatic after a period of 
bondage to the static, and attracted the astonishment 
of the public by leading a successful revolt against 
baldness, against what a critic of the time called 

the pride of natural barrenness," was the work of 
an extremely young man. Philip James Bailey 
was born in Nottingham on April 22, 1816. He was 
the son of a journalist of an excellent provincial 

69 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



type, a sturdy local politician, antiquary, and 
philanthropist, himself an amateur in verse, ^'an 
inveterate rhymer," we are told, and full of 
enthusiasm for new ideas as they revealed them- 
selves to active-thinking persons in those repressed 
and stunted thirties. The father of Philip James 
Bailey promptly acquiesced, like the father of 
Robert Browning, in the decision of his son to 
adopt "the vocation of a poet," and the boy 
seems to have been educated to that end, as 
others to become chartered accountants or 
solicitors. Nominally, indeed, the latter profession 
was selected for young Bailey, who, nevertheless, as 
early as 1835, is understood to have begun to plan 
his great poem. It is further related that in 1836 — 
the young man was in his twentieth year — he began 
to write " Festus," and in 1838 had finished the 
first draft of it. 

So far as it appears, there was nothing but 
irresistible vocation and a selective use of the most 
sympathetic models which led Bailey back to what 
had so long and so completely been neglected in 
English poetry, the record of the subtler action of 
the mind. In the midst of a fashion for scrupulous 
common sense and " the equipoise of reason," here 
was a young man of twenty who, without any sort 
of impetus from without, and in defiance of current 
criticism, devoted himself to the employment of 
clothing philosophic speculation with almost reck- 
less imagery. Henry Taylor had entreated the 
poets not to attempt to describe anything which 
70 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

cannot ^^be seen through the mere medium of our 
eyesight." But from the very outset the new bard 
was to deal wholly with impassioned spiritual life, 
exalted into a sphere unoccupied except by rapture 
and vision. You are to build, practically dictated 
the Preface of Philip van Artevelde/' nothing but 
comfortable two-storied villas, with all the modern 
appliances. The architect of '^Festus" comes, 
raising none but pinnacled archangelic mansions 
high in the unapparent. This was the note of the 
amazement with which Festus " was received in 
1839. It bore a message of good tidings to spiritual 
souls starving in a utilitarian desert. It lifted a 
palm-tree, it unsealed a well in the arid flats of 
common sense. We cannot, in the light of all that 
has been written since, appreciate in the least 
degree what Festus " was to its earliest readers, 
unless we bear this in mind. All the yearnings 
for the unlimited, all the suppressed visions of 
infinity, all who groped in darkness after the exces- 
sive, and the impassioned, and the inconceivable, 
gathered in tumult and joy to welcome this new 
voice. James Montgomery wrote that, after reading 

Festus," he felt as though he had been eating of 
the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. 

To realise what it was which hungry visionaries 
found in the new poem, it is necessary to turn back to 
what it was which was presented to them in 1839. 
The first edition of ^'Festus" is a work of remark- 
able interest. It is now very rare, and it may safely 
be said that there is no volume which justifies more 

71 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



completely the passion or mania of the book- 
collector. For sixty-three years Festus " has not 
lacked readers, and edition after edition has steadily 
supplied a demand. But the " Festus " of 1901 is 
a very different affair from the volume of the same 
name of 1839. ^^^^ place, it is very unlike 

it in size, since it contains about 40,000 verses, while 
the original edition has something less than 10,000. 
We shall presently have to describe the extra- 
ordinary manner in which Mr. Bailey, during sixty 
years, steadily added to the bulk of his poem. But 
the point to dwell on here is that the effect made 
upon his own generation was not made by the huge 
and very unwieldy book which one now buys as 

Festus" in the shops, but by a poem which was 
already lengthy, yet perfectly within the bounds of 
easy reading. It seems essential, if we are to gauge 
that effect, to turn back to the first edition. This 
was a large octavo, with no name on the title-page, 
but with a symbolic back presenting a malignant 
snake flung downwards through the inane by the 
rays that dart from a triangle of light, a very proper 
preparation for the redundant and arcane invocations 
of the text within the covers. 

The attack of the utilitarians had been chiefly 
directed against the disciples of Byron, and the new 
poet evaded the censure of such critics by ignoring 
inHhe main the influence of that daemonic enchanter. 
It is specious to see the effect of Manfred " upon 
"Festus," but in point of fact the resemblance seems 
to result from a common study of " Faust." Nor 
72 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

has the " Dr. Faustus" of Marlowe — although, since 
the publication of Lamb's " Specimens " in 1808, 
that majestic poem had been within every one's 
reach — anything very definite to do with Bailey's 
conception. This was founded, almost too closely, 
on that of Goethe's "Faust.'' The result of the 
manipulation of later editions has been more and 
more to disguise the resemblance of the original 
draft of " Festus " to its great German forerunner, 
and to this, therefore, with the edition of 1839 
before us, we must give a moment's attention. 

Bailey's poem began, not as it does now, but with 
an abrupt introduction of the reader to Heaven, 
exactly as in " Faust," with a " Prolog im Himmel." 
In each case God himself speaks, and in a triplet of 
verses. There is a "Chor der Engel," called by 
Bailey "Seraphim" and "Cherubim," and these 
combine in a great burst of melodious adoration, 
like "die himmelischen Heerschaaren " in "Faiist." 
Lucifer demands the soul of Festus to sport with, 
exactly as Mephistopheles asks for Faust. When 
the tempter abruptly appears to his meditating 
mortal victim, the startled " Who art thou, pray ? " 
of Festus is precisely the "Wie nennst du dich ?" 
of Faust. Later on, Lucifer and Festus ride Ruin 
and Darkness, the black colts of the Evil One, 
exactly as Faust and Mephistopheles do their black 
steeds after the Walpurgisnacht. In the 1839 edition 
of " Festus " the lyrical element is very much more 
prominent than in the later editions, where it has 
been steadily superseded by blank verse. These 

73 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



odes and choruses in the original text are plainly 
modelled upon the lyrics in the German poem, and, 
what is curious, it seems to be rather the second 
than the first part of Faust " which has attracted 
the English rhapsodist, whose cantatas occasionally 
recall, in their form, those of the *^Chor seliger 
Knaben " and the rest. 

It would be interesting to trace the mode in which 
Goethe influenced the mind of the young Notting- 
ham poet, whose masterpiece was to be the most 
important contribution to English literature in which 
rivalry with ^' Faust " is predominant. Bailey, as 
I am informed, never resided in Germany, and had 
but a scanty knowledge of the German language. 
The only direct reference to Goethe which I have 
found in his writings occurs in ^^The Age," where he 
remarks that — 

Wolfgangs '•^ Faust''^ flames forth the fire divine 
In many a solid thought and glowing line — 

a couplet of not particularly luminous criticism. 
I suppose that Bailey was not constrained to 
spell out the original, since, by 1836, Goethe was 
not without interpreters in this country. The 
acquaintance of Englishmen with Goethe as a force 
hardly existed earlier than 1827, when Carlyle's two 
great essays made their mark. In 183 1 Abraham 
Hayward led the army of translators with a privately 
printed Faust," and in 1832 a certain sensation was 
caused in English intellectual circles by the death 
of Goethe, a reverberating event. Then followed 
74 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

version upon version, comment upon comment ; 
the publication to the outer world of Hayward in 
1833, in 1835 "Faust" of Dr. Anster, eagerly 
commended by the Edinburgh Review — these, we 
may shrewdly conjecture, were the main media of 
inspiration to the youthful Bailey, although he prob- 
ably glanced at the original. Moreover, there 
existed a widely circulated portfolio of designs for 
" Faust " by Ritzsch, with some text in English ; 
these drawings were in the hands of the infant 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it appears, by 1836, and may 
very well have stimulated the imagination of the 
adolescent author of " Festus." There can be, at 
all events, no awkwardness in comprehending that 
the latter, without any deep knowledge of the Ger- 
man language, but by a mere happy inevitable 
instinct, could grasp the essential character of the 
sublime poem of Goethe, and bend its design to his 
own ends. The difficulty, I confess, to me is that, 
as I have said, " Festus " seems to presuppose fami- 
liarity with some scenes, at least, of the second 
part of Faust," which had not been published 
anywhere until 183 1, and was but slowly and 
confusedly recognised in England. 

In the evolution of a plot the English drama was 
far less successful than its German exemplar. The 
great disadvantage of " Festus " was immediately 
perceived to be its lack of coherent outline. Eliza- 
beth Barrett remarked that the fine things were 
worth looking for, in the design manque.'" Horne, 
one of the earliest and most judicious of admirers, 

75 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



lamented that the framework of the poem was 
unworthy of its eminent beauties of detail. The 
plot of " Festus " is, in fact, too slight to bear the 
heavy robes of brocade which are hung about its 
insufficiency. To make such a work durably weighty 
it should have an actual story, complicated and 
animated enough to arrest attention. This was 
perfectly comprehended by Goethe in both parts 
of " Faust." But the narrative element in Festus" 
is thin and vague to excess. The, hero is a human 
soul, of the highest gifts and attainments, doomed 
to despair and melancholy, and unwillingly enslaved 
to sin. The mode in which he becomes the play- 
thing of the arch -spirit of evil is impressive, but 
scarcely intelligible ; nor are the relations of the 
tempter to his victim ever realised in a vividly 
dramatic or narrative way. It would be an almost 
impossible feat to separate the story " or plot of 
" Festus" from its lyrical and rhetorical ornament. 
One has to face the fact that the poem exists in and 
for these purple robes, and that it is essentially a 
series of transcendent visions, each clothed upon by 
a fresh set of more or less sumptuous and redundant 
imagery. 

The keynote of "Festus " is a spiritual optimism. 
The lesson of the poem was easily perceived to be 
insistence upon the ministry of evil as a purifier. 
Man was to pass through sin as through a fire, and 
to come out purged from the dross of humanity. 
At the opening of the poem the note of hope is 
struck. In spite of Lucifer, and of all his ingenious 
76 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

activity, Earth and Man are improving. But God 
(the youthful Bailey was extraordinarily familiar 
with the mind of the Creator), in a speech of 
disconcerting petulance, dooms Earth to end : 
" Earth to death is given," and the pitying angels 
cover their faces. It is by playing upon the depres- 
sion of one who inhabits an orb which is about to 
be annihilated that Lucifer obtains his ascendancy 
over the spirit of Festus ; he approaches him in the 
guise of a giant force, placable and sane, that will 
give the longed-for happiness. But Festus rejects 
all the vulgar forms of joy : 

Spirit, 

It is not bliss I seek ; I care not for it. 

I am above the low delights of life. 

The life I live is in a dark cold cavern. 

Where I wander up and down, feeling for something 

Which is to be ; and must be ; what, I know not ; 

But the incarnation of my destiny 

Is nigh . . . 

The worm of the world hath eaten out my heart, 

Lucifer is equal to the opportunity ; he promises to 
renew the heart of Festus within him, and to endow 
it with immortality in spite of God. Festus wavers, 
but he is now launched upon a career of super- 
natural adventures, presented to us in a succession 
of scenes and visions. These are pleasing in pro- 
portion with their seriousness, for Bailey had none 
of Goethe's gift of laughter, and his " comic relief " 
is invariably deplorable. It is in his communion 

77 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



with infinity, in his pictures of impassioned spiritual 
life, that he is successful, and his flights are most 
fully to be trusted when they carry him farthest 
up into the empyrean. 

If we analyse the narrative of Festus," we are 
led to strange and awkward conclusions. The 
Spirit of Evil, embodied in Lucifer, rarely coincides 
with the ethical action of guilt, and is often actually 
in collision with it. One does not see what Lucifer 
has to gain from his ascendancy over Festus, since 
that personage continues melancholy, active in 
aspiration, in will passionately virtuous. The great 
evidence of his spiritual peril is the yielding of his 
intellect to the Devil, but Bailey is too delicate 
to carry out this submission to any practical issue. 
If Lucifer is very audacious, Festus does not em- 
brace the wicked suggestion, but turns and rates 
the tempter, in tones dignified and courteous, like 
those of Dr. Primrose reproving sin in Mr. Thorn- 
hill. On their Walpurgisnacht-ride over the world 
Festus and Lucifer overhear an island-people, on 
their knees before a maiden fair, singing " Hail, 
Victoria ! Princess, hail !" (a.d. 1837), quaintly 
enough it seems to be gratitude to Lucifer for 
having shown him this patriotic scene which finally 
conquers the scruples of Festus and binds him to 
the tempter. 

The central incidents of the poem are sometimes 
difficult to follow. Lucifer takes Festus up into 
the planet Venus, where they have an interview 
with the Muse, and where Angela, the dead love of 

78 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

Festus, appears to him. The scene changes to 
earth, and Festus is discovered with one "my 
Helen " at what the stage-direction calls " a large 
party and entertainment." This episode, or lyrical 
intermezzo, is long, and breaks the poem into two 
parts ; it was considered very sprightly in the 
forties. Festus sings the following song at supper : 

Thy nature is so pure and fine, 

^Tis most like wine; 
Thy blood, which blushes thro' each vein. 

Rosy champagne; 
And the fair skin which o^er it grows. 

Bright as its snows. 
Thy wit, which thou dost work so well. 

Is like cool moselle; 
Like madeira, bright and warm. 

Is thy smile's charm; 
Clare fs glory hath thine eye. 

Or mine must lie; 
But nought can like thy lip possess 

Deliciousness ! 
And now that thou art divinely merry ^ 
ril kiss and call thee, sparkling sherry. 

When Bailey is " divinely merry " he puts the 
Muses out of countenance ; yet this amazing ana- 
creontic has survived through all the editions of 
" Festus." The social occasion which opens with 
this gaiety proves a very lengthy and animated 
affair ; there are rompings and singing of arch songs^ 
and the discomfortable practice of wearing, beneath 

79 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

the lamp, wreaths of flowers which have been 
dipped in the wine-cup, much prevails. An extra- 
ordinary number of kisses, and vows, and amorous 
forfeits are exchanged, and Lucifer takes a modest 
and agreeable part in the entertainment. But at 
Nottingham, in the reign of William IV., the most 
successful evening parties came to an end before 
midnight, and one George having gone so far as to 
propose that a certain Fanny should fold him bee- 
like on her bosom's gentle tide," both Festus and 
Lucifer feel that it is time to separate, and the 
latter proposes that George should "shake hands, 
man, with eternity," or, in other words, should go 
home to bed. The stage-direction is, ^' They 
break up." 

From these faded pleasantries it is strange to 
turn to the serious portions of the poem, which 
have preserved to a remarkable degree their fresh- 
ness and sonority. Almost immediately after this 

party," so unhappy in its provinciality, we come 
upon a scene admirably dramatic in tone, and in its 
excellent ironic note of mockery not unworthy of 
Goethe or of Ibsen, in which Lucifer, in the 
guise of a ranter at the door of a church, preaches 
to the crowd a sermon on predestination, fooling 
his audience savagely, till, at last, they perceive 
his intention and turn to kill him. There is 
nothing of its kind finer in the poetry of that age 
than this magnificent sermon where it turns from 
persiflage to contemptuous invective. " Tremble I " 
cries Lucifer to his conventional congregation — 
80 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

Tremble ! ye dare not believe, 
No, cowards ! sooner than believe ye would die. 
Die with the black lie flapping on your lips 
Like the soot-flake upon a burning bar. 
Be merry ^ happy if ye can : think never 
Of him who slays your souls, nor Him who saves, — 
There^s time enough for that when youWe a-dying / 

Men are not to resist — such is the gospel of 
Lucifer ; let yourselves go, he preaches, be swept on. 
Resistance is the beginning of spiritual life, it gives 
God his chance for leverage. Prance merrily 
off, skim like bubbles on the river, for then you 
are sure to come to me." This is very Goethesque : 
"stiirzt euch in Peneios' Fluth !" one remembers. 

Although the subject is so audacious and apoca- 
lyptical, the text of the first edition of "Festus" is 
remarkable for simplicity of diction. There is a 
general absence of pomposity ; the author is in- 
spired, with evident earnestness, by a genuine 
ecstasy of spiritual life. He submits to " visions of 
sublime convocation," but he avoids the error of 
translating these into swollen and preposterous 
language. It is the more needful to insist on this 
because in later editions Bailey contrived to spoil 
his poem in this respect. He lost a great deal of his 
directness of speech, and he substituted for it, as we 
shall presently see, a bombastic splendour which 
did him grievous wrong. But the blank verse of 
the original ^' Festus," which has something of the 
best parts of Young's "Night Thoughts" (that 
very stately piece of elaborate rhetoric, nowadays 

F 8i 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



so unjustly decried), is plain, full, and direct, with 
curious touches of realism. Its lyrics are less 
happy. Sometimes, as in the ballad of The Gipsy 
Maid," we have such a vivid improvisation as we 
could imagine a bard composing by a watch-fire 
in a mountain-pass, with no art, no care, yet 
with a long breath of melancholy music. But, in 
the main, it is the non-lyrical parts of Festus " 
which fascinate its readers now, as they did those of 
sixty years ago, by their unsatisfied yearnings after 
infinity, their enfranchised metaphysical specula- 
tion, and their uplifted clarion-cries of melody and 
vision. 

Ill 

Reviewers of the prevailing school, who held 
that poetry should be rational, broad, and calm, 
received "Festus" in 1839 with bewilderment. 
To some of them it seemed less an achievement 
in art than an exercise in theological mysticism run 
mad. But the general verdict of the best judges 
was highly favourable, and when it became known 
that it was the production of a youth of two-and- 
twenty, it was looked upon as a kind of portent. 

There seemed nothing preposterous in comparing 
such a work with the famous monuments of 
literary precocity, with the "Ode on Christ's 
Nativity," with the " Essay on Criticism," with 
"Endymion." What might not the author attain 
to ? It could not be questioned that " Festus " was 
a better poem than "Queen Mab" ; why should 
82 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

young Bailey not grow up to be as great a poet as 
Shelley ? Already he possessed sustained powers 
of a very high order. He had actually achieved, 
at these his tender years, a body of philosophical 
verse strenuous, fervent, and elevated. He had 
already, as Swift might have said, his wings and his 
music. What he lacked was what youth never 
possesses, a sense of proportion, a delicacy of 
workmanship, a full command over his materials. 
These would naturally follow with the ripening 
years, "which mellow what we write to the dull 
sweets of rhyme." 

By what inscrutable fate was it ordained that 
in this case the gifts never ripened at all ? At 
twenty-three Bailey was perhaps the most " promis- 
ing " of living English poets, and at eighty-six that 
promise was still to be fulfilled. In 1902, as in 
1839, Philip James Bailey was the author of 

Festus," neither more nor less. Had he died in 
the last-mentioned year he would have retained a 
foremost place among our inheritors of unfulfilled 
renown " ; he would be habitually mentioned with 
Chatterton. But, by the oddest irony, he survived, 
actively endeavouring to improve his position, until 
extreme old age, and yet was never able to recapture 
his earliest melody and fervour. Meanwhile his 
arrested development and successive mishaps did 
not affect to any appreciable degree the fate of his 
solitary production, which continued and continues 
still to have a wide circle of readers. The case is odd 
in itself and singular in the history of our literature 

83 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

The earliest reception of ^^Festus" was mainly 
by those most intimately interested in the art of 
poetry. Tennyson, Bulwer Lytton, Thackeray^ 
the Brownings, and Horne were among its few 
original admirers and advocates. But as time went 
on, the ring of readers spread further outwards 
and became steadily less esoteric. The edition of 
1846, which bore the author's name on the title- 
page, greatly added to the quantity of his readers, but 
took something from their quality. Tennyson, who 
had been rapturous, while advising FitzGerald to 
read Festus " — There are really very grand things 
in it" — confessed that his correspondent would 
'^most likely find it a great bore." (Any human 
being, by the way, less likely to appreciate 
Festus " than FitzGerald it would be difficult to 
imagine.) The Brownings, even, now saw spots in 
the sun. But with this slackening of technical or 
professional interest in Bailey there grew up a 
public sympathy founded on the matter of his poem^ 
its theological positions, its doctrine of ultimate 
salvation, its bewitching theory of remedial chas- 
tisement, its universalism. This process of divorce 
from the purely literary current of the time has 
continued ever since, and is the cause of several of 
the anomalies of Bailey's celebrity. 

Borne on a tide of imaginative earnestness, the 
young author had declared that whatever he had 
received, in a rush of improvisation, was made 
independent of the workmanlike attributes of the 
art by the fullness of his message and the abundance 

84 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

of his imagery. With incomparable boldness this 
lad of twenty-three had written as the colophon of 
his poem : 

Read this, world I He who writes is dead to thee. 
But still lives in these leaves. He spake inspired: 
Night and day, thought came unhelped, undesiredy 

Like blood to his heart. 

This is an impressive attitude, so long as the 
inspiration lasts ; but suppose it to be withdrawn ? 
It is then that the rhapsodist feels the lack of that 
craft and discipline of art which he scorned in the 
hour of his prophetic afflatus. There was never 
a greater disappointment than attended the publi- 
cation of Bailey's second volume, The Angel 
World," in 1850. The opportunity was matchless, 
since a generation had now grown up emancipated 
from all the sedative legislation of Southey and 
Taylor. Highly coloured poetry was at present in 
fashion ; imagination had reasserted its supremacy 
over reason. There was no fear that Bailey's verse 
would be reproved because of its excess of force and 
fervour. But The Angel World," to use Jeffrey's 
phrase, wouldn't do." It was a kind of celestial 
romance in blankverse,faintlyreminiscent of Eloa" 
and still more faintly of " The Loves of the Angels." 
It repeated, in less seductive accents, the universalist 
dogma of Festus " — good and bad alike were finally 
to be lapped in the mantle of the Eternal rest : 

They who had erred and they who taught to err, 
Along with those who, wise and pure, withstood, 

85 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



But it was, either as a tale or as a sermon, extra- 
ordinarily unexhilarating. However, although the 
little volume has never been re-issued, the reader 
may in this matter indolently form his own opinion^ 
since Bailey, finding that people would not accept 
" The Angel World," formed an ingenious and un~ 
fortunate project, which he continued to carry out 
for the rest of his life. If a poem was received by 
the critics and the public with marked disfavour, he 
would be even with them by putting it bodily into 
the next edition of ^' Festus." The argument in his 
mind seems to have been something like this : " You 
won't read my new piece, and you say you prefer 
'Festus'? Very well, then it shall form part of 
* Festus/ and so you will be obliged to read it." 
Accordingly, as research will prove, '^The Angel 
World " was broken into two parts, and was silently 
implanted in the middle of the next edition of 
"Festus," with such verbal adaptations as were 
necessary, but otherwise without change. 

Internal evidence tends to show that the crushing 
failure of " The Angel World " convinced the poet 
of his error in depending wholly on improvisation 
or " inspiration." In 1855 published The 
Mystic," a volume which displays a close preoccupa- 
tion with form. It consists of three unrelated poems, 
of which the first is modelled on Shelley's " Alastor," 
while the second, called " A Spiritual Legend," is a 
strenuous and almost violent pastiche of Miltonic 
blank verse, the stresses and inversions and elisions 
of the rhythm of Paradise Lost " being reproduced 
S6 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

as though for a wager. In particular, the Miltonic 
use of proper names is introduced without restraint, 
so as to produce at length an almost ludicrous effect, 
although often in itself beautiful in its full echo of 
Milton : 

By great Shedad, city occult, whose walls 
Towered in alternate tiers of silver and gold ; 
Where bright Herat, city of roses, lights 
With dome and minaret the landskip green / 
Damasek old, old By bios, or Babel, 
Or Tchelminar, or Baalbek, or where Balkh, 
Mother of cities, murally encrowned, 
Mourns. 

There are magnificent lines in both these poems, 
but especially in A Spiritual Legend." The fault 
of them is their obscurity, their vagueness ; it is, 
frankly, impossible to know what The Mystic " 
is all about. It must be considered mainly as an 
exercise in versification, undertaken, oddly and 
perhaps pathetically, by a poet who felt that some- 
thing divine, a gift of youth, was slipping from him, 
and who determined to recapture it by a tardy and 
vain preoccupation with the form and structure of 
verse. 

Certain fragments of the volume of 1855 were 
shredded, in the extraordinary fashion already men- 
tioned, into the ever-swelling Festus," although 
most of " The Mystic " was rebellious to this kind of 
adaptation. But Bailey had formed the idea, long 
before this, that the original outline of ^^Festus" 
was sufficiently elastic to be stretched indefinitely : 

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PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



more or less " — ambiguous phrase ! — he had per- 
ceived this from the beginning, he wrote in 1889. 
Reworked everything into the design of his drama ; 
he accounted for all his later fancies and rhapsodies 
by thinking ''This will do for ' Festus.'" He 
thought that there had been revealed to him a new 
and more rational idea of Hell, and he now scarcely 
wrote anything in which his ideas of the limitation 
of punishment and the eternity of universal bliss 
did not find place. A curious example of this 
persistency may be given. The last of the three 
pieces which form the volume of 1855 is a ballad 
called " A Fairy Tale " ; it is one of Bailey's least 
fortunate productions, a languid and insipid story 
of how a little girl was disporting at eve in a verdant 
ring, when she was pounced down upon by the 
fairies, and persuaded to live with them. The 
hasty reader might easily see in this nothing but 
a piece of unusually guileless and puerile early 
Victorian mock-romance, but if he pushes on he 
will find his Bailey. The little girl casually dis- 
covers that the fairies are greatly dejected by their 
lack of a soul, so she sits up at the flower-embroidered 
banquet and eloquently propounds to Sir Oberon 
and to '' divine Titania, night's incomparable queen/' 
the glad theory of universal salvation. It really 
became with Bailey a King Charles's head. 

Of the later publications of Bailey it is kinder 
not to speak in detail. "The Age," of 1858, was a 
satire on the manners and morals of the day, in 
heroic couplets; ''Universal Hymn," in Thomsonian 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

blank verse, of 1867, was cut up in the usual way, 
to feed that poetical Oliver Twist, the insatiable 
'^Festus"; "Nottingham Castle/' of 1878, was an 
attempt at an historical ode in the grand style. No 
poet ever did more in his later years to destroy the 
favourable impression created by the writings of his 
youth. For the last quarter of a century Mr. Bailey 
gave up the vain attempt to attract readers to his 
miscellaneous writings. He frankly abandoned them, 
and we deed not dwell upon them. He could 
afford to throw these punier children of his brain 
to the wolves, because of the really formidable 
proportions which his first-born had gradually 
attained. To a recent visitor he said, plainly, that 
he was the author of one book, and that is what he 
will remain in the chronicle of literature. His 
obstinate determination to present his string of 
scenes as a whole, in spite of the hopelessly in- 
vertebrate character of the design, has in the end 
led to a sort of acceptation of " Festus " as a 
definite achievement. 

IV 

Of attempts to "place" the author of "Festus'' 
in relation to other authors, the earliest, so far as I 
am able to discover, was that made by Robert 
Chambers in 1858. This careful critic, surveying 
the literature of his day, observed "a group of 
philosophical poets — men of undoubted talent, 
learning, and poetic imagination, but too often 

89 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



obscure, mystical, and extravagant." This group, 
he explained, consisted of P. J. Bailey, Robert 
Browning, and Richard Hengist Horne. To-day 
the differences between Festus," Paracelsus,'' 
and *^ Orion " are more striking than the similarities, 
but Bailey had a pronounced admiration for both 
the latter poems. For the Brownings Mr. Bailey 
preserved an enthusiastic regard, but there is no 
trace of their style upon his.^ In fact, we look in 
vain for contemporary influences in ^^Festus"; 
Goethe for matter, Milton, Thomson, and Shelley 
for manner, were Bailey's masters, and occasionally 
he was faintly touched by Byron. It will be found 
that what was ultimately discarded from " Festus " 
as immature is in the main Byronic. The prevailing 
Byronism was a weed which he uprooted from his 
poetic garden, as Tennyson and Browning are said 
to have done from theirs. 

Mr. Bailey's interest in the successive generations 
which he saw rise up and pass away was kindly but 
fluctuating. He liked a gorgeous texture in poetry, 
and was therefore attracted to D. G. Rossetti and 
much later to Lord de Tabley. About 1870-75 
he indulged, anonymously, in a certain amount of 
reviewing, and said very kind and delicate things 
about some of the poets that were at that time 

1 Miss F. C. Carey, the niece and constant companion of 
Mr. Bailey, tells me that her uncle became acquainted with 
" Paracelsus " soon after the pubhcation of " Festus," prob- 
ably in 1840, as the gift of Westland Marston. This disposes 
of any idea of the influence of the earher on the later poem. 
90 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

making their first bow to the public. But more 
interesting is the fact that in the fifties he was taken 
as a model by a group of writers who made a great 
stir for a moment, and are now too readily forgotten. 
These were the Spasiiiodists, as they were called, 
who accepted the rather formless " Festus " as 
the pattern for huge semi-dramatic pieces more 
amorphous still ; Alexander Smith, in A Life 
Drama" (1853), Sydney Dobell, in ^'Balder" (1854), 
and John Stanyan Bigg, in Night and the Soul " 
(1854), displayed themselves as the docile and 
reverent offspring of Bailey. Why the influence 
of " Festus " suddenly, after so many years, made 
its appearance thus sown broadcast is curious, and 
curious too the extravagance of these imitations. 
Perhaps no one ever soared and sank so violently 
as did the author of Night and the Soul." Yet 
even the Spasmodists had merits, which might 
detain a critic, but here they are interesting to us 
only as a cluster of satellites oddly circling round 
the planet of " Festus " in its mid-career. 

The Spasmodists imitated Mr. Bailey's ecstasy, 
but not his moral earnestness and not his original 
strain of religious philosophy. His was a mind of 
greater weight and fuller body than theirs. He was 
often redundant and sometimes nebulous, but there 
was always something definite behind the coloured 
cloud. His occasional excursions into prose were 
not fortunate, for his style was awkward and heavy, 
and he liked to coin impossible words : he says 

evilhood," for instance, although even he seems 

91 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



to have blenched before the use of " goodhood." 
His prose was unattractive, therefore, but it is worth 
examining, because it reveals the intense convictions 
which led the writer onward. In natural tempera- 
ment, I think, Mr. Bailey was timid, but in his 
determination to thrust his message on the world 
he showed an absolute courage which neither 
ridicule, nor argument, nor neglect could shake in 
the slightest degree. And this may bring us to a 
reflection to which the study of " Festus " must 
inevitably lead, namely, that in this his single-minded 
earnestness lay the secret of Mr. Bailey's reward. 
A word to indicate in what way this operated must 
close this brief study of his work and character. 

With a curious misuse of a phrase which has 
become almost a journalistic cliche, Bailey has been 
recently called a "poet's poet." If this term has 
a meaning at all, it refers to the quality which 
makes certain writers, whose nature leads them to 
peculiar delicacy of workmanship, favourites with 
their fellow-craftsmen, although little comprehended 
by the vulgar. Mr. Bailey was the exact opposite 
of these poets. There was nothing in his work to 
attract students of what is exquisitely put, and, as a 
rule, he has been little appreciated by these rarer 
spirits. His form is so plain as to be negligible ; it is 
in his matter, in his ethical attitude, that he is found 
attractive by those — and they are numerous — who 
in several generations have come under his spelL 
" Festus " appeals to the non-literary temperament, 
which is something very different indeed from 
92 



PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 

saying that it appeals to the anti-literary. Those 
who love it appreciate its imagery, its large music, 
its spacious landscape, but they value it mainly for 
its teaching. No purely aesthetic estimate of the 
poem will satisfy those who reply, Yes, what you 
say is technically true, no doubt ; but it has helped 
and comforted me, and it helps me still." In many 
a distant home, in America even oftener than in 
Great Britain, a visit to some invalid's room would 
reveal the presence of two volumes on the bed^ 
the one a Bible, the other " Festus." This is an 
element in the popularity of Philip James Bailey 
which criticism is powerless to analyse. But no 
consideration of his remarkable career is complete 
if a record of it is neglected. 

1902. 



93 



ORION" HORNE 

1 802-1 884 



"ORION" HORNE 

The publication of the love letters which passed, 
in 1845 1846, between Robert Browning and 
Elizabeth Barrett blew a little of the dust off 
several names which were brightly before the 
public then and have become sadly obscured since. 
The two learned lovers speak of Mr. Serjeant 
Talfourd and of his incomparable tragedy of 
*^ Ion/' of Sir John Hanmer and his sonnets, of 
the terrible criticisms of Chorley, of the writings 
of Abraham Heraud and Silk Buckingham and 
Cornelius Mathews. These are faded notorieties 
with a vengeance. But amongst these names, 
faintly echoing from the earliest Victorian period, 
we meet with one more than the rest deserving 
of perpetuation, with at all events a greater mass 
of actually accomplished work attached to it, the 
name of Mr. Horne, the author of Cosmo de 
Medici," of '^Gregory VII.," and, above all, of 
the farthing epic," the once extremely celebrated 
Orion." And with this there comes vividly back 
to me a vision of an extraordinary personage, of 
whom I saw a great deal in my youth, and of 
whom I feel disposed to garner some of my 
impressions before I lose them. 

G 97 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

He had been baptized Richard Henry Home, 
but in late middle life he had changed the second 
of these names to Hengist. It was in 1874 that 
I set eyes on him first, in circumstances which 
were somewhat remarkable. The occasion was 
the marriage of the poet, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, 
to the eldest daughter of Westland Marston, the 
playwright. There was a large and distinguished 
company present, and most of the prominent 
" Pre-Raphaelites," as [they were still occasionally 
called. In the midst of the subsequent festivities, 
and when the bride was surrounded by her friends, 
a tiny old gentleman cleared a space around him, 
and, all uninvited, began to sit upon the floor and 
sing, in a funny little cracked voice, Spanish songs 
to his own accompaniment on the guitar. He was 
very unusual in appearance. Although he was 
quite bald at the top of his head, his milk-white hair 
was luxuriant at the sides, and hung in clusters of 
ringlets. His moustache was so long that it 
became whisker, and in that condition drooped, 
also in creamy ringlets, below his chin. The elder 
guests were inclined to be impatient, the younger 
to ridicule this rather tactless interruption. Just 
as it seemed possible something awkward would 
happen, Robert Browning stepped up and said, in 
his loud, cheerful voice : " That was charming. 
Home ! It^quite took us to ' the warm South ' 
again,'' and cleverly leading the old gentleman's 
thoughts to a different topic, he put an end to the 
incident. 

98 



"ORION" HORNE 

This scene was very characteristic of Horne, who 
was gay, tactless, and vain to a remarkable degree. 
He had lately come back from Australia, where 
nothing had gone well with him for long together, 
and he did not understand the ways of the younger 
generation in London. But to those who could be 
patient with his peculiarities he offered a very 
amusing study. He had delightful stories, many of 
which are still inedited, of the great men of his 
youth — Wordsworth, Hunt, Hazlitt, in particular. 
But he himself, with his incredible mixture of affec- 
tation and fierceness, humour and absurdity, 
enthusiasm and ignorance, with his incoherency of 
appearance, at once so effeminate and so muscular, 
was better than all his tales. He was a com- 
bination of the troubadour and the prize-fighter, on 
a miniature scale. It was impossible not to think 
of a curly white poodle when one looked at him, 
especially when he would throw his fat little person 
on a sofa and roll about, with gestures less dignified 
than were, perhaps, ever before seen in a poet of 
between seventy and eighty years of age. And yet 
he had a fine, buoyant spirit, and a generous 
imagination with it all. But the oddity of it, alas ! 
is what lingers in the memory — those milky ringlets, 
that extraordinary turn of the head, that embrace 
of the beribboned guitar ! 

In a pathetic little letter which Horne wrote to 
me in his eightieth year, he said, quite placidly, that 
though he was now forgotten, no poet had ever had 
more pleasant things said of him by people dead 

99 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



and gone. It was perfectly true. Wordsworth and 
Tennyson, Leigh Hunt and Walter Savage Landor, 
had all praised his poetry ; Carlyle had declared 
that "the fire of the stars was in him," and 
G. H. Lewes that he was "a man of the most 
unquestionable genius." How highly Robert and 
Elizabeth B'-owning regarded him may be seen 
over and over again in the course of their corre- 
spondence. But his talent was of a very fugitive 
kind. He was a remarkable poet for seven or eight 
years, and a tiresome and uninspired scribbler for 
the rest of his life. His period of good work began 
in 1837, when he published "Cosmo de Medici" 
and "The Death of Marlowe" ; it closed in 1843, 
with the publication of "Orion," and the composi- 
tion of all that was best in the " Ballad Romances." 
If any one wished to do honour to the manes of 
poor old Horne — and in these days far less distin- 
guished poets than he receive the honours of 
rediscovery — the way to do it would be to publish 
in one volume the very best of his writings, and 
nothing more. The badness of the bulk of his 
later verse is outside all calculation. How a man 
who had once written so well as he, could ever 
come to write, for instance, " Bible Tragedies " 
(1881) is beyond all skill of the literary historian to 
comprehend. 

But, although Horne was, for a short time, a 
good poet, he was always more interesting as a 
human being. His whole life was an adventure ; it 
was like a "book for boys." He was pleased to 
100 



"ORION" HORNE 

relate that even his birth was not ordinary, for he 
came into the world so exactly at the stroke of 
midnight on the last day of the year that it could 
never be decided whether he was born in 1802 or 
1803. I do not know who his parents were or 
what his family. In the days when I saw so much 
of him he appeared to be quite solitary ; he never 
spoke of possessing a relative. He was trained for 
the army, and lost his chance through some foolish 
escapade. But before this he had been at school 
at Enfield, where Tom Keats, the poet's brother, 
and Charles Wells, who wrote " Joseph and his 
Brethren," had been his school-fellows. He used 
to tell us in his old age that he was once scamper- 
ing out of school, when he saw the chaise of 
Mr. Hammond, the surgeon, standing at the door. 
John Keats, who was Hammond's apprentice, was 
holding the horse, his head sunken forward in a 
brown study ; the boys, who knew how pugnacious 
Keats was, dared Horne to throw a snowball at 
him, which Horne did, hitting Keats in the back of 
the head, and then escaping round the corner at a 
headlong pace. It used to be very thrilling, in the 
eighties, to hear the old gentleman tell how he had 
actually snowballed Keats ; almost as though one 
should arise and say that he had sold Shakespeare 
a cheese-cake. 

Just before he should have entered Sandhurst the 
young Horne was lured away to America, and 
offered himself as a volunteer in the War of 
Mexican Independence. He entered the new Mexi- 

loi 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

can navy as a midshipman, and dashed about under 
irregular fire at the bombardment of Vera Cruz and 
at the siege of San Juan Ulloa. He used to tell us 
that he never would miss his swim in the sea in 
the morning, nor return to the ship until he had 
been well within range of the guns of Vera Cruz. 
The Spaniards could never hit him, he said ; 
but one day when he was making a long nose 
at the gunners, he was as nearly as possible 
swallowed from behind by a shark. I forget 
how he accounted for his escape, but there was 
always a good deal of Baron Munchausen about 
Mr. Horne. 

When the Mexican War was over, he strolled 
across the United States, with a belt full of doubloons 
girded about his person, and visited the Mohawks, 
the Oneidas, and the Hurons. He had a fight with 
a Red Indian brave and beat him, and carried away 
a bunch of eagle-feathers from his body. After 
many strange adventures, he must needs bathe in 
public under the cataract of Niagara. Two of his 
ribs were found to be broken when he was fished 
cut again, insensible. He then took a steerage 
passage in a steamer that was wrecked in the St. 
Lawrence. He walked in moccasins over to Hali- 
fax, Nova Scotia, and started again in a timber 
ship, whose crew rose in mutiny and set fire to her 
in mid-Atlantic ; Mr. Horne quelled the mutiny and 
put out the fire, to the eternal gratitude of the 
captain, who fell upon his knees upon the deck and 

kissed his hands. I delighted in Mr. Home's stories 

1 02 



"ORION" HORNE 



of his past life, but sometimes I used to fear that he 
exaggerated. 

It was not until he was thirty years of age that 
Horne began to take up literature, and he was 
thirty-five when he enjoyed his first success with 
" Cosmo de Medici/' an historical tragedy in blank 
verse, which has some very fine passages, and was 
greatly admired in the London coteries. Then came 
the period of seven years, of which I have spoken, 
in which Horne really took his place, with Brown- 
ing and Tennyson, as one of the promising poets of 
the age. If he had died in 1844, he would probably 
hold a high place still, as an " inheritor of unful- 
filled renown," but unfortunately he lived for forty 
more years, and never discovered that his talent 
had abandoned him. His "Orion," which was 
published in 1843, was brought out at the price of 
one farthing. Elizabeth Barrett sent out to the 
nearest bookshop for a shilling's worth, but was 
refused her four dozen copies. Purchasers had to 
produce their brass farthing for each " Orion/' and 
no ichange was given. This was done '^to mark 
the public contempt into which epic poetry has 
fallen," but it was also a very good advertisement. 
Everybody talked about Mr. Home's "farthing" 
poem, and after some editions had run out the 
price was cautiously raised. But when the tenth 
edition appeared, at a cost of seven shillings, the 
public perceived that its leg was being pulled, and 
it purchased " Orion " no more. In spite of all 
this, " Orion " is far indeed from being a humorous 

103 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



composition ; it is a dignified and melodious 
romance of Greek symbolism, with some remote 
relation to the " Hyperion " of Keats, and contains 
some admirable passages. 

The poets of the opening years of Queen Victoria's 
reign were almost all of them tempted to write 
philosophical poetry. Robert Browning had led the 
way with ^' Pauline " and Paracelsus." Bailey 
had produced Festus " j Ragg, the lace-worker 
(now forgotten), had made a temporary mark with 
" The Deity," a formidable essay ; Miss Barrett 
wrote " The Drama of Exile " ; there were the lucu- 
brations of John Edmund Reade. None of these 
laborious poems could be styled successful, but they 
all were interesting in their curious contemporary 
effort to reconcile ideas with sensations, on a grand 
scale. These writers believed that unless a poem 
contained a philosophy it was, on the whole, a poor 
affair. Horne joined the band of the philosophers 
when he wrote Orion," which is perhaps, as a 
poem, the best of the group. His mind was not 
disciplined, but he always had a curiosity about the 
literature of thought. He made the acquaintance, 
about 1841, of a doctor of philosophy. Dr. Leonard 
Schmitz, who came over from Bonn to introduce 
German literature to English readers. Conversation 
with Schmitz set Home's thoughts running in the 
direction of a poem which should re-establish the 
union which had existed in ancient times between 
philosophy and poetry, before analysis stepped in 
and divorced them. The effort was one quite 
104 



"ORION" HORNE 

beyond Home's power to carry out successfully, 
but he wrote what is by no means the worst of 
modern machines. 

This is the poet's explanation of his spiritual 
epic," as Elizabeth Barrett called it, as it appeared 
to him thirty years afterwards : 

"Orion, the hero of my fable, is meant to present 
a type of the struggle of man with himself — that is to 
say, the contest between the intellect and the senses, 
when powerful energies are equally balanced. 
Orion is man standing naked before Heaven and 
Destiny, resolved to work as a really free agent to 
the utmost pitch of his powers for the good of his 
race. He is a truly practical believer in his gods 
and in his own conscience; a man with the 
strength of a giant; innocently wise; with a heart 
expanding towards the largeness and warmth of 
Nature, and a spirit unconsciously aspiring to the 
stars. He is a dreamer of noble dreams and 
a hunter of grand shadows (in accordance with 
the ancient symbolic myth), all tending to healthy 
thought or to practical action and structure. He is 
the type of a Worker and a Builder for his fellow- 
men." 

There is in this commentary a touch of the teach- 
ing of Carlyle, who in his turn perused " Orion " 
with marked affability. The sage of Chelsea had 
recently published " Heroes and Hero-worship," 
which had no warmer admirer than Horne. " Orion," 
then, the "farthing epic," appeared with every 
circumstance in its favour and enjoyed a very 

105 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



considerable success. Why it is no longer read it 
would be difficult to say. Its lustrous descriptions 
of primeval giants are solemn and beautiful, but 
unfortunately the memory goes back to " Hyperion." 
Yet this is unjust, and it would be puzzling to define 
what it is that makes so very careful and accom- 
plished a work not any longer easy to read, in spite 
of its excellent proportions, moderate length, and 
indisputable dignity. The deliberate opinion " of 
Edgar Allan Poe was that " in all that regards the 
loftiest and holiest attributes of true poetry ^ Orion ' 
has never been excelled." It is certainly very good ; 
listen : 

Ye rocky heights of Chios, where the snow. 

Lit by the far-off and receding moon. 

Now feels the soft dazvn^s purpling twilight creep 

Over your ridges, while the mystic dews 

Swarm down and wait to he instinct with gold 

And solar fire ! — ye mountains waving brown 

With thick-winged woods, and blotted with deep caves 

In secret places ; and ye paths that stray 

E'en as ye list ; what odours and what sighs 

Tend your sweet silence through the star-showered night. 

Like memories breathing of the Goddess-forms 

That left your haunts, yet with the day return. 

Excellent, until we come to the last two lines, which 
are invaded by that curious flatness characteristic of 
English poetry in the unfortunate reign of King 
William IV. When Douglas Jerrold said that 
Horne had "presented an undying gift to the 
io6 



"ORION" HORNE 

world " in " Orion," he forgot to estimate the 
element of decomposition involved in the language 
of all metrical writers between Keats and Tennyson. 
Darley, Wade, Wells, Bailey, Heraud, and Beddoes 
— they all had the unfortunate crack in the voice 
which made them, with their wealth of enthusiasm 
for the grand style, incapable of carrying it out 
without incessant lapses into mediocrity of expres- 
sion. And Home, to use a vulgar expression, is 
tarred with the same William IV, brush. Yet there 
are very good things in Orion," lines such as : 

^Tis always morning somewhere in the world y 

and passages of Greek landscape, of which this is by 
no means an isolated example : 

since the breath of spring had stirred the woods. 
Through which the joyous tidings busily ran. 
And oval buds of delicate pink and green 
Broke, infant-like, through hark of sapling boughs, — 
The vapours from the ocean had ascended. 
Fume after fume, wreath after wreath, and floor 
On floor, till a grey curtain upward spread 
From sea to sky, and both as one appeared. 
'Now came the snorting and intolerant steeds 
Of the Sun's chariot towards the summer signs ; 
At first obscurely, then with dazzling beams, 

and so on. And, as some one has said of Lamartine's 
efforts in the same kind, there is throughout 
Orion," if not a philosophy, at all events a credit- 
able movement of philosophical reflection. 

It is known to Apollo only what varied employ- 

107 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



ments Horne took up when the Muses began to 
abandon him. He was sub-editor of Household 
Words under Dickens, and special commissioner 
of the Daily News to Ireland when the great 
famine broke out. Suddenly, and desperately deter- 
mined to marry, he went down to stay with Miss 
Mitford in Berkshire, and proposed to all the neigh- 
bouring heiresses one after another, to the intense 
indignation of that lady, who declared that he had 
used her hospitable dining-room, on the same day, 
to propose to a lady (with ;^5o,ooo a year) at lunch, 
and to another (with ;^4o,ooo a year) at tea. None 
of these efforts was crowned with success ; perhaps 
he had the presumption to be in love with Elizabeth 
Barrett, whom he had at that time never seen, 
although oceans of correspondence had passed 
between them. At all events, directly Robert Brown- 
ing had carried off his eminent bride, Horne 
appeared with a little Miss Foggs upon his arm, 
whom he presently married. They did not get on 
together ; why should history conceal the fact, when 
Horne himself was wont to dilate upon it so freely 
to his friends ? Mrs. Horne, in tears, threw herself 
upon the paternal sympathy of Charles Dickens, and 
Horne indignantly sought a southern hemisphere. 

In Australia he was commander of the Gold 
Escort, and it was delightful, years afterwards, to 
hear him tell how he convoyed several tons of 
bullion from Ballarat to Melbourne amid every 
circumstance of peril. Then he became Gold 
Commissioner to the Government, but here his 
io8 



"ORION" HORNE 

flow of high spirits carried him away. He 
then flung himself into the cultivation of the 
cochineal insect, edited a Victorian newspaper, 
became Commissioner of Waterworks, gave lessons 
in gymnastics, professed the art of natation, and 
was one of the starters of Australian wine-growing. 
Long afterwards, when the first Australian cricketers 
came over to England, Horne wrote to me : I 
learn that the cricketers have made each £1000 over 
here ! Why, oh ! why did not I become an 
Australian cricketer, instead of an unprofitable 
swimmer ? When years no longer smiled upon 
my balls and runs, I might have retired upon my 
laurelled bat, and have published tragedies at my 
own expense. Is there any redress for these things 
in another world ? I don't think so ; I shall be 
told I had my choice." He certainly paid his 
money. No one, I suppose, ever failed in so many 
brilliant, unusual enterprises, every one of which 
was sure to succeed when he adopted it. 

When he came back from Australia, I think about 
1869, he was in very low water. He had managed 
very deeply to offend Charles Dickens, who had 
taken up the cause of Home's neglected wife. 
What happened to Horne in the early years after 
his return I never heard ; I fancy that he went 
abroad again for some part of the time. A little 
later Robert Browning, who had always felt a 
sincere regard for Horne, was able to be of practical 
service to him. He was encouraged to republish 
his poems, and to appeal by means of them to the 

109 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

new age. In these days one used to meet him at 
afternoon parties, carrying with great care, under 
his arm, the precious guitar, which he called "my 
daughter," and was used ceremoniously to introduce 
as " Miss Horne." A little later in the evening 
Horne would be discovered on a low stool, warbling 
Mexican romances, or murmuring with exaggerated 
gallantry to the prettiest girl in the room. All this 
time he was thirsting for publicity — if he could only 
be engaged to sing in public, to box in public, to 
swim in public, how happy he would be ! It used 
to be said that when he was nearly seventy Horne 
persuaded the captain of a ship to tie his legs 
together and fling him into the sea, and that he 
swam with ease to the boat. A wonderful little 
ringleted athlete, no doubt ! 

A great deal of Home's work in verse, and even 
in prose, remains unpublished, and is not very 
likely, I should think, to be ever printed. As I 
have said, his faculty, which had been so graceful, 
faded away from him about forty years before he 
died. When he was in Australia he wrote a 
good deal, among other things a choral drama, 

Prometheus, the Fire-Bringer," which was actually 
composed out in the bush, and lost, and written all 
over again, still in the bush. The first edition of 
this poem is styled " by Richard Henry Horne," 
and the second, which followed soon after, "by 
Richard Hengist Horne," showing the period at 
which he adopted the more barbaric name. I have 
glanced through a mass of Home's manuscript, 

I lO 



"ORION" HORNE 

which I possess (I believe that Mr. Buxton Forman 
possesses a great deal more), to see whether I can 
find anything unpublished which is good enough 
to offer to the readers of this volume. The fol- 
lowing impromptu is at least brief ; it was composed 
when the poet was in his seventy-eighth year : 

THE SPRING-TIDE OF THE BARDS 

Ah, where is the Spring-tide of Poets of old. 

When Chaucer lov'd April and all her sweet showers. 

When Spenser'' s knights felt not their armour strike cold, 
Tho^ lost in wet forests or dreaming in bowers ? 

^Tis a far other planet to us in this season. 

And Nature must own we complain with some reason ! 

For north winds, and east winds, and yellow-fac^d fogs. 
And thunders and lightnings that scare buds and shoots. 

May cheer the hoarse chorus of cold-blooded frogs. 
But Man craves lifers future, and fears for its fruits. 

Then come again, Spring, like the dear songs of old ^ 

Where the crocus smiled daily in sunlight and gold. 

Home's cheerfulness was a very pleasant feature 
in his character. Life had treated him scurvily, 
love had missed him, fame had come down and 
crowned him, and then had rudely snatched the 
laurel away. If ever a man might have been 
excused for sourness, it was Horne. But he was 
a gallant little old man, and if it was impossible 
not to smile at him, it was still less possible not 
to recognise his courage and his spirit. Curiously 
enough, Elizabeth Barrett, who carried on so close 

1 1 1 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

a correspondence with Horne in her unmarried 
days, but who, warned by Miss Mitford, never 
would allow him to call upon her in person, had 
an accurate instinct of his merits and his weak- 
nesses, and all the casual remarks about Horne 
which she makes in the course of her letters to 
Robert Browning strike one who knew Horne well 
in later years as singularly exact and perspicacious. 
His edition of her letters to him, published about 
twenty years ago in two volumes, is becoming a 
rare book, and contains many things of remarkable 
interest and importance. 

It was from 1876 to 1879 that we saw him most 
frequently. He was living at this time in two 
rooms in Northumberland Street, Regent's Park, 
in very great poverty, which he bore with the 
gayest and most gallant insouciance. An attempt 
was made — indeed, several attempts were made — 
to secure for him a little pension from the Civil 
List, and these were supported by Carlyle and 
Browning, Tennyson and Swinburne, to name no 
smaller fry. But all in vain ; for some reason, 
absolutely inscrutable to me, these efforts were 
of no avail. It was darkly said that there were 
reasons why Mr. Gladstone would never, never 
yield ; and he never did. When Lord Beaconsfield 
came into office, he granted the poor little old man 
£^0 a year, but even then he had not too much 
food to eat nor clothes to keep him warm. Still he 
went bravely on, shaking his white ringlets and 
consoling himself with his guitar, He was fond 

112 



"ORION" HORNE 



of mystery, which is a great consoler. For 
economy's sake, he used to write on post-cards, 
but always with a great deal of care, so that the 
postman should be none the wiser. I have such a 
post-card before me now ; it is an answer to 
a proposal of mine that he should come in and 
take dinner with us : 

'^Nov, 29, 1877. 
The Sharpshooter's friendly shot just received. 
By adroitly porting my helm, and hauling out my 
flying jib, I shall, by 7 o'clock this evening, be able 
to get the weather-gauge of the Cape I was bound 
for, and run into your Terrace. Thine. 

Reefer." 

Nothing, surely, could be more discreet than that. 

To the very last he was anxious to regain his old 
place as a man of letters, and his persistency was 
really quite pathetic. One did not know what to do 
with his suggestions. I appeal to any one acquainted 
with the business of literature whether anything 
can be more trying than to receive this sort of 
communication : 

" Don't you think curiosity might be aroused if 

you could induce the editor of the to print 

something of this kind : ^ We understand that a 
leading periodical will shortly contain a Dramatic 
Scene by the Author of Orion," entitled ^The Circle 
of the Regicides," in which such interlocutors as 
Dr. Kobold, Prof. Franz Tollkopf, Hans Arbeits- 
dulder, and Baron Dumm von Ehrsucht will repre- 

H 113 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

sent certain well-known characters. There will also 
be brought upon the scene the Apparitions of Brutus, 
Cromwell, the patriot Mazzini, and the philan- 
thropist Robert Owen ; together with a chorus of 
French and Russian revolutionists, with a trio and 
chorus of female Regicides.' On second thoughts, 
perhaps, better stop after * Owen.' " 

It was difficult to bring such suggestions as these 
within the range of practical literature. 

Home's physical strength was very extraordinary 
in old age. It was strangely incompatible with the 
appearance of the little man, with his ringleted locks 
and mincing ways. But he was past seventy before 
he ceased to challenge powerful young swimmers to 
feats of natation, and he very often beat them, carrying 
off from them cups and medals, to their deep disgust. 
He was nearly eighty when he filled us, one evening, 
with alarm by bending our drawing-room poker to 
an angle in striking it upon the strained muscles of his 
fore-arm. He was very vain of his physical accom- 
plishments, and he used to declare that he was in 
training to be a centenarian. These are things that 
should never be said, they tempt the fates ; so one 
day, just after poor Mr. Horne had been boasting, he 
was knocked down by a van in Lisson Grove, and, 
although J he rallied in a wonderful way, he was 
never the same man again. Presently, on March 13, 
1884, he died at Margate, whither he had been 
removed to take the benefit of the sea-air. He was 
in his eighty-second year. It would be a great pity 
that a man so unique and so picturesque should be 
114 



"ORION" HORNE 

forgotten. As long as the world is interested in 
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Horne can never be 
entirely forgotten, but he deserves to be remembered 
for his own sake. 



"5 



I 



AUBREY DE VERE 

1 8 14-1902 



AUBREY DE VERB 

On January ig, 1902, there passed away in his sleep 
the most venerable of the then-living poets of the 
Anglo-Saxon world. There is an old house in County 
Limerick, with a deer park round it and a lawn that 
slopes to a lake, all combining to form one of the 
most exquisite estates in the south of Ireland. 
There Mr. Aubrey de Vere was born at the beginning 
of 1 814, and there, having reached his eighty-ninth 
year, he died. It would be impossible to conceive 
a more gentle, innocent, or delicate life than his was 
or a more happy one. He did not marry ; he con- 
secrated all his activities to the service of literature, 
and of religion, and of his friends. It was his 
singular good fortune to be protected from every 
species of care or anxiety. He was not rich, yet 
he had the ease and dignity of circumstance 
which make it possible to concentrate the mind 
on higher thoughts than surround our daily bread. 
He was not poor, and yet he was screened by 
conditions from all that makes the possession of 
wealth disturbing and hardening. Mr. Aubrey de 
Vere was more fortunate than the farm-folk in 
Virgil, for he knew that he was happy. In the 

119 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



moderation of his desires, in the resigning of all 
vain ambitions, he was as wise as he was pure and 
good. 

Among my treasures I possess a copy of the 
Sonnets " of his father, Sir Aubrey de Vere, pre- 
sented to me by the son, as a kind inscription sets 
forth, in the year 1869. For the guidance of posterity, 
however, I have to say that I was not acquainted 
with Mr. de Vere at so tender an age as this would 
seem to imply. By one of those slips of the pen 
which we all make, but which in old age we forget 
to amend, Mr. de Vere wrote 1869 when he meant 
1896. It was, in fact, not until the latter year that I 
had the privilege of forming an acquaintance which 
he allowed to ripen into something like a friendship. 
I met him early in 1896, by special arrangement and 
in conditions singularly delightful, at the house of 
an Irish lady who is devoted to literature. The poet 
was already in his eighty-third year, and my recollec- 
tions, therefore, are of a very old man. But they 
are by no means of an infirm or senile man. The 
mental freshness and buoyancy of his mind con- 
tinued, I suppose — for I did not see him for several 
months before his death — almost, if not quite, to the 
end. They certainly survived, with no symptom of 
decay, until long after 1896. His letters, which 
were filled with the enthusiastic love of poetry, con- 
tinued to breathe the loftiest intellectual ardour 
even when the implacable years had so shaken the 
hand that it became difficult to read what was 
written. This beautiful elasticity of spirit was 
120 



AUBREY DE VERE 



perhaps the most surprising feature in the wonderful 
old age of Mr. Aubrey de Vere. 

His appearance at about the age of eighty-three is 
very vivid in my recollection. He entered the room 
swiftly and gracefully, the front of his body thrown 
a little forward, as is frequently the case with tall and 
active old men. His countenance bore a singular 
resemblance to the portraits of Wordsworth, although 
the type was softer and less vigorous. His forehead, 
which sloped a little and was very high and domed, 
was much observed in the open air from a trick he 
had of tilting his tall hat back. I used to think, 
very profanely, that in profile, on these occasions, 
he bore a quite absurdly close resemblance to the 
Hatter in " Alice's Adventures," especially when, as 
was frequently the case, he recited poetry. I am 
sure that any open-minded person who recollects 
Mr. de Vere will admit that Sir John Tenniel's im- 
mortal drawing of the Hatter repeating "Twinkle, 
twinkle, little bat ! " is irresistibly reminiscent of our 
revered friend. In spite of this there was something 
extraordinarily delicate and elevated in his address. 
He was, in fact, conversation made visible. I never 
knew a more persistent speaker. If he broke bread 
with one, the progress of the meal would be inter- 
rupted and delayed from the very first by his talk, 
which was softly, gently unbroken, like a fountain 
falling upon mosses. On one occasion, when we sat 
together in a garden in the summer, Mr. de Vere 
talked, with no other interruption than brief pauses 
for reflection, for three hours, in itself a prodigious 

121 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



feat for an old man of eighty-five, and without the 
smallest sign of fatigue. 

In spite of the fact that he occasionally used what 
are called " strong expressions " — w^ith a little playful 
affectation, I used to think, of the man of the world 
— Mr. Aubrey de Vere had an ecclesiastical air, 
like that of some highly cultivated, imaginative old 
ahbe. He possessed a sort of distinguished inno- 
cence, a maidenly vivacious brightness, very charm- 
ing and surprising. He once remarked to me that 
the feminine characteristics of Newman were always 
recurring to his memory, that as he looked back 
upon the early Oxford days he continually had the 
impression in Newman of " a kind of virginal 
remoteness mingled with extremely tender grace." 
When he said this I could not help feeling that 
although there was no " remoteness " about Mr. de 
Vere, there was something of the same feminine 
grace. 

The principal, indeed perhaps the only, sign of 
advanced old age which the poet presented until 
near his end was the weakness of his voice. This 
must have once been, I think, very melodious, but 
already when I knew him first it had become so 
faint as to be sometimes scarcely audible, particularly 
in company. It was therefore most pleasant to be 
alone with him, especially in the open air, where he 
seemed to speak with particular freedom and ease. 
The astonishing fullness of his memory made his 
conversation marvellous and delightful. He not 
merely passed, with complete comprehension of the 
122 



AUBREY DE VERE 

relative distance, from events of 1820 to events of to- 
day, but his verbal memory was astounding. He 
garnished his recollections of Wordsworth, Rogers, 
Landor, or Sir Henry Taylor with copious and 
repeated quotations from their poetry. Indeed, he 
once assured me that of certain favourite poets — in 
particular Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats — he still 
retained, at the age of eighty-four, substantially 
the bulk of their writings." He said that his principal 
occupation had been and still was, in his solitary 
walks or by the fire, to repeat, silently or aloud, 
pages after pages of poetry. His memory of the 
great writers was, he believed, so exact that in these 
exercises he had the illusion that he was reading from 
the printed book. 

The friends of Mr. Aubrey de Vere were so well 
versed in the stores of his memory that they antici- 
pated an immense pleasure from his Recollections," 
which he published in 1897. T^^^^^ was a charming 
book in many ways, but it was in some degree a dis- 
appointment. It was in no sense what we had 
hoped it would be, an autobiography ; it recalled a 
variety of incidents and places which had interested 
the writer, yet it told but Uttle of what had moved 
him most. The inherent delicacy and shyness of the 
author spoiled the effect. " Self," he said, is a 
dangerous personage to let into one's book," but^ 
unfortunately, without it an autobiography is 
*^ Hamlet " with the part of the Prince of Denmark 
omitted. There is much in Aubrey de Vere's 
" Recollections " which is delightful, but those who 

123 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

enjoyed his conversation miss in the published book 
a great deal that they recall as particularly original 
and delightful. For instance, I once asked Mr. de 
Vere who, among all the great souls he had known, 
had impressed him the most. He said instantly, 
" Wordsworth and Newman ; they are the two for 
whom my love has been most like idolatry." There 
were precious pages about Newman in the ^'Recollec- 
tions," but the great disappointment of that book 
was the comparative absence of any salient notes 
about Wordsworth. I think Mr. de Vere felt the 
subject too sacred for public annotation, and yet in 
personal talk he was always ready to return to it. 
His loyalty to Wordsworth was a passion. In the 
very latest letter which I received from him, in a 
hand so flickering that it is hard to decipher, he says : 
Old Christopher North was the first, except Leigh 
Hunt, who plucked up heart of grace, 'wrote all like 
a man/ and so forced the public at last to read 
Wordsworth. He said so often and so loudly — 
what St. Augustine had said to the pagan world — 
* So read these things that you may deserve to under- 
stand them,' that at last a large part of that world 
did come to understand that the greatest of the 
philosophic poets was even then living in their 
midst." Is it not an enviable gift still to be able to 
care so much about poetry and philosophy as the 
ninetieth year approaches ? 

Many notes which his friends had taken of Mr. 
de Vere's conversations were rendered nugatory by 
the publication of his book ; some, however, have 
124 



AUBREY DE VERE 



still their value. He toned down in publication, for 
instance, the impression of his seeing Newman for 
the first time in 1838, and his spoken words, which 
I noted in 1896, were much more vivid. I had asked 
him to tell me how the future cardinal struck him. 
He was silent for a moment and then replied, with 
a light in his blue eyes, " The emotion of seeing him 
for the first time was one of the greatest in my life. 
I shall never forget his appearance. I had been 
waiting some time and then the door opened and 
Newman, in cap and gown, entered very swiftly and 
quietly, with a kind of balance of the figure like a 
very great lady sweeping into the room. That was 
my first impression ; the second was of a high-bred 
young monk of the Middle Ages whose asceticism 
cannot quite conceal his distinguished elegance." 
Another unpublished impression of Oxford deserves 
to be recorded. Mr. de Vere went to hear Newman 
preach his famous sermon on Vain Works. He was 
a little late, and as he took a remote seat he thought 
with annoyance that he should not hear anything. 
But he heard every syllable ; Newman's voice was 
musical, but very low, yet every word told. Mr. de 
Vere observed to himself on this occasion that it 
seemed as though Newman's thought was so clear 
that it was impossible not to perceive the impression 
of it. You seemed less to be hearing him speak 
than think. Innumerable links, such as these, with 
the past were broken by the death of this beloved 
and venerated man. 



125 



A FIRST SIGHT OF 
TENNYSON 



A FIRST SIGHT OF 



TENNYSON ' 

There is a reaction in the popular feeling about 
Tennyson, and I am told that upon the young he 
has lost his hold, which was like that of an octopus 
upon us in my salad days. These revolutions in 
taste do not trouble me much ; they are inevitable 
and they are not final. But those who " cannot 
read " Maud " and In Memoriam " to-day must 
take it on the word of a veteran that forty years ago 
we, equally, could not help reading them. There 
was a revolt against the tyranny now and then ; in 
particular, after ^*The Loves of the Wrens" and 

Enoch Arden " a rather serious mutiny broke 
out among Tennyson's admirers, but Lucretius " 
appeared and they were enslaved again. 

It is strange to look back upon the unrestrained 
panegyric which took the place of the higher criticism 
of Tennyson in the closing years of the nineteenth 
century. When a very clever man like the late Duke 
of Argyll, a man of sober years, could say, without 
being reproached, that Tennyson's blank verse in the 

Idylls " was sweeter and stronger than " the stately 
march of Elizabethan English in its golden prime" ; 

I 129 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



when Mr. Gladstone could declare of Arthur in 
the same Idylls" that he "knew not where to look 
in history or letters for a nobler or more over- 
powering conception of man as he might be," then 
a reaction, however tenderly delayed, was inevit- 
able. The uncritical note of praise is almost more 
surely hurtful to a reputation than the uncritical 
note of blame, for it makes a wound that it is much 
harder to heal. Tennyson is now suffering from 
the extravagant obsequiousness of his late Victorian 
admirers. At the moment of which I am about to 
speak, Tennyson had published nothing since " The 
Holy Grail," and it was understood that he was 
slightly startled by the arrival of Swinburne, Morris, 
and the Rossettis on a stage which he, with Robert 
Browning still very much in the background, had 
hitherto sufficiently filled. But the vogue of these 
new-comers was confined to the elect. In the world 
at large Tennyson was the English living poet par 
excellence, great by land and great by sea, the one 
survivor of the heroic chain of masters. 

It was the early summer of 187 1, and I was 
palely baking, like a crumpet, in a singularly 
horrible underground cage, made of steel bars, 
called the Den. This was a place such as no 
responsible being is allowed to live in nowadays, 
where the transcribers on the British Museum staff 
were immured in a half-light. This cellar was 
prominently brought forward a year or two later in 
the course of a Royal Commission on the British 
Museum, being " lifted into notice " only to be 
130 



A FIRST SIGHT OF TENNYSON 



absolutely condemned by the indignation of the 
medical faculty. I was dolefully engaged here, 
being then one of the humblest of mankind, a 
Junior Assistant in the Printed Books Department 
of the British Museum, on some squalid task, in 
what was afterwards described by a witness as an 
atmosphere " scented with rotten morocco, and an 
indescribable odour familiar in foreign barracks," 
when a Senior Assistant, one of the rare just spirits 
in that academical Dotheboys Hall, W. R. S. 
Ralston, came dashing down the flights of curling 
steel staircase, to the danger of his six feet six of 
height, and of the beard that waved down to his 
waist. Over me he bent, and in a whisper (we were 
forbidden to speak out loud in the Den) he said. 

Come up stairs at once and be presented to 
Mr. Tennyson ! " 

Proud young spirits of the present day, for whom 
Hfe opens in adulation, will find it scarcely possible 
to realise what such a summons meant to me. As 
we climbed those steep and spiral staircases towards 
light and day, my heart pounded in my chest with 
agitation. The feeling of excitement was alm^ost 
overwhelming : it was not peculiar to myself ; such 
ardours were common in those years. Some day a 
philosopher must analyse it — that enthusiasm of the 
seventies, that intoxicating belief in ^'the might of 
poesy." Tennyson was scarcely a human being to 
us, he was the God of the Golden Bow ; I 
approached him now like a blank idiot about to be 
slain, or was I a worm, too low-crawling for death, 

131 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



O Delphic Apollo ? " It is not merely that no 
person living now calls forth that kind of devotion, 
but the sentiment of mystery has disappeared. 
Not genius itself could survive the kodak snapshots 
and the halfpenny newspapers. 

It must, I suppose, have been one of those days 
on which the public w^as then excluded, since we 
found Tennyson, with a single companion, alone 
in what was then the long First Sculpture Gallery. 
His friend was James Spedding, at whom in other 
conditions I should have gazed with interest, but in 
the Delphic presence he was not visible to my 
dazzled eyes. Mr. Thornycroft's statue of the poet, 
now placed in Trinity College, gives an admirable 
impression of him at a slightly later date than 1871, 
if (that is) it is translated out of terms of white 
into terms of black. Tennyson, at that time, was 
still one of the darkest of men, as he is familiarly 
seen in all his earlier portraits. But those portraits 
do not give, although Mr. Thornycroft has suggested, 
the singular majesty of his figure, standing in repose. 
Ralston, for all his six feet six, seemed to dwindle 
before this magnificent presence, while Tennyson 
stood, bare-headed among the Roman Emperors, 
every inch as imperial-looking as the best of them. 
He stood there as we approached him, very still, 
with slightly drooping eyehds, and made no move- 
ment, no gesture of approach. When I had been 
presented, and had shaken his hand, he continued 
to consider me in a silence, which would have 
been deeply disconcerting if it had not, somehow, 
132 



A FIRST SIGHT OF TENNYSON 



seemed kindly, and even, absurd as it sounds, 
rather shy. 

The stillness was broken by Ralston's irrelevantly 
mentioning that I was presently to start for Norway. 
The bard then began to talk about that country, 
which I was surprised to find he had visited some 
dozen years before. Ralston kindly engaged 
Spedding in conversation, so that Tennyson might 
now apply himself to me ; with infinite goodness he 
did so, even making conversation," for I was hope- 
lessly tongue-tied, and must, in fact, have cut a very 
poor figure. Tennyson, it miraculously appeared, 
had read some of my stammering verses, and was 
vaguely gracious about them. He seemed to accept 
me as a sheep in the fold of which he was, so 
magnificently, the shepherd. This completed my 
undoing, but he did not demand from me speech. 
He returned to the subject of Norway, and said it 
was not the country for him to travel in, since you 
could only travel in it in funny little round carts, 
called karjols, which you must drive yourself, and 
that he was far too near-sighted for that. (I had 
instantly wondered at his double glasses, of a kind 
I had never seen before.) 

Then somebody suggested that we should examine 
the works of art, which, in that solitude, we could 
delightfully do. Tennyson led us, and we stopped 
at any sculpture which attracted his notice. But 
the only remark which my memory has retained 
was made before the famous black bust of Antinous. 
Tennyson bent forward a little, and said, in his deep, 

133 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



slow voice, " Ah ! this is the inscrutable Bithynian ! " 
There was a pause, and then he added, gazing into 
the eyes of the bust : If we knew what he knew, 
we should understand the ancient world." If I live 
to be a hundred years old, I shall still hear his rich 
tones as he said this, without emphasis, without 
affectation, as though he were speaking to himself. 
And soon after, the gates of heaven were closed, 
and I went down three flights of stairs to my hell of 
rotten morocco. 



134 



A VISIT TO WHITTIER 



I 



I 



A VISIT TO WHITTIER 



When I was in Boston in 1884, my brilliant and 
hospitable friend Mr. W. D. Howells received a 
letter from the poet Whittier, expressing a most 
kind wish that I should visit him. It would have 
been a great satisfaction to me to have seen him in 
summer, and in his own beautiful home at Amesbury, 
where he settled in 1836, and where he resided until 
his death in 1892, although at the moment of his 
demise he happened to be visiting a friend at Horton 
Falls. It would have been delightful to carry away 
an impression of that noble, calm figure in the midst 
of its household gods. But, if I remember rightly, 
the mansion at Amesbury was at that time being 
altered in some way ; at all events, Mr. Whittier was 
staying with female relations at a house, called Oak 
Knoll, near the town of Danvers. It was, moreover, 
n the depth of the hard New England winter ; all the 
landscape was choked with snow. Certainly, the 
visitor's attention would be the more exclusively 
concentrated on the appearance and conversation 
of his celebrated host. Accordingly, an appoint- 
ment was made, and on December 6 I set forth on 
quite an arctic expedition to discover the author of 
^'Snow Bound." 

137 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



I have a superstition that all very agreeable 
adventures begin with a slight mishap. I was not 
prepared to believe Mr. Whittier so difficult to 
reach as I found him. We arrived early at the 
dismal railway station of Danvers, and a hack was 
persuaded to drive us to the entrance of Oak 
Knoll. All this Massachusetts landscape, doubtless 
enchanting at other times of the year, is of a most 
forbidding bleakness in midwinter. The carriage 
deposited us and drove oif, leaving us to struggle 
up to the homestead, and we arrived with relief 
under the great pillars of an ample piazza. Perhaps, 
in leafy seasons, Oak Knoll may have its charms, 
but it was distinctly sinister that December morning. 

We rang, and after a long pause the front door 
opened slightly, and a very unprepossessing dog 
emerged, and shut the door (if I may say so) behind 
him. We were face to face with this animal, which 
presented none of the features identified in one's 
mind with the idea of Mr. Whittier. It sniffed un- 
pleasantly, but we spoke to it most blandly, and it 
became assured that we were not tramps. The dog 
sat down and looked at us ; we had nowhere to sit 
down, but we looked at the dog. Then, after many 
blandishments, but feeling very uncomfortable, I 
ventured to hold the dog in conversation, while I 
rang again. After another pause, the door was very 
slightly opened, and a voice of no agreeable timbre 
asked what we wanted. We explained, across the 
dog, that we had come by appointment to see Mr. 
Whittier. The door was closed a second time, and, 

138 



A VISIT TO WHITTIER 



if our carriage had still been waiting, we should 
certainly have driven back to Danvers. But at 
length a hard-featured woman grudgingly admitted 
us, and showed us, growling as she did it, into a 
parlour. 

Our troubles were then over, for Mr. Whittier 
himself appeared, with all that report had ever told 
of gentle sweetness and dignified, cordial courtesy. 
He was then seventy-seven years old, and, although 
he spoke of age and feebleness, he showed few signs 
of either ; he was, in fact, to live eight years more. 
Perhaps because the room was low, he seemed 
surprisingly tall ; he must, in fact, have been a 
little less than six feet high. The peculiarity of his 
face rested in the extraordinarily large and luminous 
black eyes, set in black eyebrows, and fringed with 
thick black eyelashes curiously curved inwards. 
This bar of vivid black across the countenance was 
startlingly contrasted with the bushy snow-white 
beard and hair, offering a sort of contradiction 
which was surprising and presently pleasing. He 
was careful to keep on my right side, I noticed, 
being presumably deaf in the right ear ; even if this 
were the case, which he concealed, his hearing 
continued to be markedly quick in a man of his 
years. 

His generosity to those much younger and less 
gifted than himself is well known, and I shall not 
dwell on the good-natured things which he 
proceeded to say to his English visitor. He made 
no profession at any time of being a critic, and his 

139 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



formula was that such and such verse or prose had 
given him pleasure — I am grateful to thee for 
all that enjoyment," was his charming way of being 
kind. But I will mention what he said about one 
book, the Life of Gray," because I do not remem- 
ber that Gray is mentioned in any of the published 
works of Whittier. He said that he had delighted in 
that narrative of a life so quiet and so sequestered 
that, as he put it, it was almost more "Quakerly" 
than that of any famous member of the Society ; 
and he added that he had been greatly moved 
by the fullness and the significance of a career 
which to the outside world might have seemed 
absolutely without movement. Thee were very 
fortunate," he went on, " to have that beautiful, 
restful story left to tell after almost all the histories 
of great men had been made so fully known to 
readers." 

He asked me what and whom I had seen. Had 
I yet visited Concord ? 1 responded that I was 
immediately about to do so, and then he said 
quickly, ^^Ah ! thee should have come a little 
sooner, when we were still united. There were 
four of us a little while ago, but two are gone, and 
what is Concord without Emerson ? " He spoke 
with great emotion of Emerson — the noblest 
human being I have known " — and of Longfellow — 
"perhaps the sweetest. But you will see Holmes," 
he added. I replied it was my great privilege to be 
seeing Dr. Holmes every day, and that the night 
before he had sent ail sorts of affectionate messages 
140 



A VISIT TO WHITTIER 

by me to Mr. Whittier. The latter expressed great 
curiosity to see Holmes's short " Life of Emerson," 
which, in fact, was published five or six days later. 
With reminiscences of the past, and especially of 
the great group of the poets his contemporaries, my 
venerable host kept me long entertained. 

He presently said that he would leave me that he 
might search for a portrait of himself, which he was 
so kind as to offer to me as a memorial of my visit. 
I proposed to take my leave, but he insisted that 
I must not go ; he was absent about twenty minutes, 
resting, as I gathered, from the exertion of 
speaking, which had caused a noticeable hoarseness. 
He returned, entirely refreshed, and was once more 
delightfully communicative. I know not how he 
was induced to go back to the early anti-slavery 
days, but this subject having been started, he 
pursued it with the greatest vivacity. I was left 
with the impression that on his sedentary and noise- 
less existence the troubles of 1835 had left an 
indelible impression — that these formed, indeed, the 
most exciting pivot for his reminiscences. He told 
the story of the Concord riots eagerly and merrily, 
no doubt in almost the same words as he had often 
told it before. His eyes flashed, he slapped his 
knees, he may almost be said to have gesticulated, 
and there was something less than Quakerly quiet- 
ism in his gusto at the exciting incidents of the 
narrative. He told how he was met in the street 
of Concord by the rioters, who were looking for 
George Thompson, the abolitionist lecturer. 

141 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

Thompson was a man of about his own age, and 
the mob, supposing Whittier to be he, pelted the 
poet with rotten eggs and, worse than that, with 
stones. Their aim was bad, for they scarcely 
touched Whittier with the more serious missiles, 
which rattled instead on the wooden fence behind 
him. He said it made him feel like the Apostle 
Paul. Another abolitionist, a Mr. Kent, at this 
moment providentially opened his street-door, and 
Whittier was pulled in out of the angry crowd. I 
forget exactly what happened next, but there was 
a great deal of shouting and firing, and in the 
process of time George Thompson seems to have 
joined the other anti-slavery men in their refuge. 
At all events, Mr. Whittier described, with immense 
animation and spirit, how it became necessary at 
length to make a dash, and how Thompson and he 
were brought in a carriage to a side-door, and the 
horse suddenly whipped through the unexpectant 
crowds out of the town and far away before 
any one thought of pursuing them. At this final 
recital the old gentleman could remain seated no 
longer, but started from his chair and fought 
his battle o'er again. No doubt it was all recorded 
history, and could be reconstructed with closer 
accuracy from the books, but it was a delightful 
and quite sufficing experience to hear it thus told 
by the most distinguished person engaged, after an 
interim of nearly fifty years. 

If it is not too trifling, I must mention, in connec- 
tion with his magnificent, lustrous eyes, that, the 
142 



A VISIT TO WHITTIER 

conversation turning upon the hues of things, Mr. 
Whittier greatly surprised me by confessing that he 
was quite colour-blind. He exemplified his condition 
by saying that if I came to Amesbury I should be 
scandalised by one of his carpets. It appeared that 
he was never permitted by the guardian goddesses of 
his hearth to go shopping " for himself, but that 
once, being in Boston, and remembering that he 
needed a carpet, he had ventured to go to a store and 
buy what he thought to be a very nice, quiet article, 
precisely suited to adorn a Quaker home. When it 
arrived at Amesbury there was a universal shout of 
horror, for what had struck Mr. Whittier as a 
particularly soft combination of browns and greys 
proved to normal eyes to be a loud pattern of bright 
red roses on a field of the crudest cabbage-green. 
When he had told me this, it was then easy to 
observe that the fullness and brilliancy of his 
wonderful eyes had something which was not 
entirely normal about them. 

He struck me as very gay and cheerful, in spite of 
his occasional references to the passage of time and 
the vanishing of beloved faces. He even laughed, 
frequently and with a childlike suddenness, but 
without a sound. His face had none of the im- 
mobility so frequent with very aged persons ; on 
the contrary, waves of mood were always sparkling 
across his features and leaving nothing stationary 
there except the narrow, high, and strangely receding 
forehead. His language, very fluid and easy, had 
an agreeable touch of the soil, an occasional rustic 

143 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



note in its elegant colloquialism, that seemed very 
pleasant and appropriate, as if it linked him naturally 
with the long line of sturdy ancestors of whom he 
was the final blossoming. In connection with his 
poetry, I think it would be difficult to form in the 
imagination a figure more appropriate to Whittier's 
writings than Whittier himself proved to be in the 
flesh. 

Two days later I received from Mr. Whittier a 
very kind letter and the gift of his latest volume of 
poems, The Bay of Seven Islands." It was far 
from being his last, for it was to be followed by 
two more in his lifetime and by a gleaning of post- 
humous verses. But it was the book of an old man, 
and in reading it one was reminded that fifty-three 
years had passed since Legends of New England" 
had first given the name of Whittier to the lovers of 
poetry. In saying that The Bay of Seven Islands " 
is an old man's book, however, I do not mean that 
it shows marks of senile failure, but only that 
the eye of the writer is constantly on the past, 
counting the sheaves, watching the red colour 
in the western sky. In verses not less sincere 
because they are a little rough, he offers his own 
apologia. He desires, he says, that it shall be said 
of him when he is gone : 

Haier of din and not 
He lived in days unquiet ; 
And, lover of all beauty. 
Trod the hard ways of duty, 

144 



A VISIT TO WHITTIER 



To all who dumbly suffered. 
His tongue and pen he offered ; 
His life was not his own, 
IS! or lived for self alone. 

This we can clearly assert must always be said of 
Whittier. But what will impartial criticism, which 
is deaf to all the virtues if their expression be not en- 
shrined and kept fresh in really fine literature, decide 
about the poetry of this good and graceful man ? 

Mr. Whittier was composing verses all his life, 
and the difference of quality between those he wrote 
at twenty and at eighty is remarkably small. He 
was a poet in the lifetime of Gifford and Crabbe, 
and he was still a poet when Mr. Rudyard Kipling 
was already famous. During this vast period of 
time his style changed very little ; it had its ups and 
downs, its laxities and then its felicities, but it bore 
very little relation to passing conditions. There rose 
up beside it Tennyson and Browning, Rossetti and 
Swinburne, but none of these affected Whittier. His 
genius, or talent, or knack— whichever we choose to 
call it — was an absolutely local and native thing. It 
was like the Indian waters of strange name of which 
it sang, Winnepesaukee and Merrimac and Katahdin ; 
it streamed forth, untouched by Europe, from 
among the butternuts and maples of the hard New 
England landscape. The art in Whittier's verse was 
primitive. Those who love his poetry most will wish 
that he had possessed a better ear, that he could have 
felt that ^^mateless" does not rhyme with "greatness." 
In all his books there is a tendency to excess, to 

K 145 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



redundancy ; he babbles on, even when he has 
nothing very inspired to say. 

But when all this is acknowledged, none but a 
very hasty reader will fail to recognise Whittier's 
lasting place in the history of literature. He is not 
rich, nor sonorous, nor a splendid artist ; he is even 
rather rarely exquisite, but he has an individuality 
of his own that is of durable importance. He is 
filled with moral enthusiasm, as a trumpet is filled 
with the breath of him who blows it. His Quaker 
quietism concentrates itself till it breaks in a real 
passion-storm of humanity^ and when Whittier is 
roused he sings with the thrilling sweetness of a 
wood-thrush. By dint of simplicity and earnestness, 
he frequently hits upon the most charming phrases, 
instinct with life and truth ; so that the English poet 
with whom it seems most natural to compare him in 
the lyrical order is the epic and didactic Crabbe. 
If the author of "The Borough" had been 
dowered with the gift of writing in octosyllabics and 
short stanzaic measures, and had been born of stern 
Puritan stock in Massachusetts, and had been roused 
by the sight of a public iniquity, such as slavery, 
recognised and applauded in society, he might have 
presented to the world a talent very much resembling 
that of Whittier. But, as it is, we look around in 
vain for an English or American poet of anything 
like the same merit who shares the place of Whittier. 

The grave of the admirable Quaker poet at Ames- 
bury is hemmed in by a hedge of vigorous arbor 
vitae. His memory, in like manner, depends for its 
146 



A VISIT TO WHITTIER 



protection, not on the praise of exotic communities 
which can never, though they admire, rightly com- 
prehend it, but on the conscience of New England, 
shy, tenacious, intrepid, to which, more than any 
other poet has done, Whittier made a direct and 
constant appeal. 



147 



■I 
I 

i 



THE AUTHOR OF "JOHN 

INGLESANT " 

1 834-1 903 



\ 



THE AUTHOR OF "JOHN 
INGLESANT " 

The two volumes of her husband's ''Letters 
and Literary Remains/' which Mrs. Shorthouse 
pubhshed in 1905, must have familiarised a great 
number of readers with a favourite author whO; 
during his lifetime, was something of a mystery to 
most of them. In order to see Joseph Henry 
Shorthouse in the flesh it was necessary to make a 
pilgrimage to Birmingham, where he shone for 
twenty years as the principal literary light. Over 
this light, even in its provincial sphere, for a 
long time there descended more and more closely 
the extinguisher of an ill-health which gradually 
obscured it completely. One cannot be certain 
that even these volumes, so devotedly and so 
punctiliously prepared by his widow, will repeat 
for the many the impression which his very curious 
person made upon the few who knew him. Upon 
myself, who saw him first nearly thirty years ago, 
when his energies were at their height, the effect he 
then made was startling. I had vaguely anticipated 
something Quakerish or clerical, something faintly 

151 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



recalling the seventeenth-century Puritan clergy- 
man, with perhaps a touch of Little Gidding. Very 
elegant and colourless, one fancied him ; a grave 
man, pale v^^ith meditation and dyed in the drab 
tincture of provinciality. 

The exact opposite was the fact. ]. H. Shorthouse 
was one of the most eighteenth-century-looking 
people who have been seen in our day. But it was 
not the eighteenth century of Gainsborough and 
Romney which he represented ; it was Italian. To 
tell the truth, the instant and irresistible impression 
which he gave was that of a mask of 1750 suddenly 
revived out of some serious and romantic pastoral. 
He did not seem a part of actual existence ; he 
made his entry facendo il bergamasco^ and one 
almost expected him to take off his large artificial 
face, so much too big for his body, and reveal a 
living Shorthouse below. With this curious illusion 
of wearing a mask were connected his love of a 
discreet but unusual gaiety of colour in dress, and 
the movements of his soft, slightly prelatical hands. 
His extreme courtesy and his few and stereotyped 
but unusual gestures made it easy to think of a 
Shorthouse, scarcely changed at all, moving in 
the kaleidoscopic procession of figures in some 
Neapolitan festival. Mrs. Shorthouse, with laudable 
courage, does not attempt to disguise from her 
readers what was the great physical misfortune of 
her husband's life, his incurable stammer. When 
I knew him first, this was not yet incessant and was 
still under some control. But it added to that strange 
152 



"JOHN INGLESANT" 

resemblance with Italian types of the eighteenth 
century, since the recollection of the stutter of 
Tartaglia (if I may be pardoned for saying so) was 
made irresistible by it. 

It is perhaps not fantastic to say that, in his 
intellectual character also, Shorthouse loved to 
wear a domino and fling a purple cloak across his 
shoulders. His mind went through life playing a 
grave and graceful part, and his whole scheme of 
culture was a delicate sport or elaborate system of 
make-believe. He had never been in Italy, or, 
indeed, across the English Channel, yet he loved 
to fancy that he had travelled extensively and 
confidentially in romantic Catholic countries. It 
is the custom nowadays to speak of his pictures of 
Italy as artless and clumsy " — the word (which 
would have cut Shorthouse to the quick) was 
actually used to describe them the other day. It 
does not seem to me that they deserve this censure^ 
which is based upon a supposition that every author 
is bound to paint topographically, with his eye on 
the object, like Ruskin or Mr. Maurice Hewlett. 
Some people think they have swept Shorthouse 
away if they can prove that a palace which he 
supposed to be of white marble is really built of 
red brick. The staircase of the house in Edgbaston 
was lined with fine impressions of the engravings of 
Piranesi, and Shorthouse, seeing my eye rest on 
these one day, said, I got all my Italian local 
colour out of those prints." Now, it is — not to be 
captious — precisely " colour " that one does not get 

153 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



out of the stately convention of Piranesi. Con- 
sequently, the author of "John Inglesant" had, 
unconsciously, to supply a great deal out of his 
brooding imagination. The whole thing was false, 
in a sense, if you like to put it so ; he was not 
describing, he was hardly creating, he was simply 
facendo il bergamasco. 

The author who " does his bergamask " runs the 
greatest risk of being misconceived by criticism. 
All the righteous commonplaces are trotted out 
against him. He is told that what he writes is 
laboured and unreal, he is called self-conscious and 
academic, he is advised to put off his domino and 
his cloak and to behave like other people. He is 
reproved because life does not affect him directly 
and because he has no objective sympathy with 
mankind. This is the note of clever criticism 
to-day with regard to " John Inglesant," a book 
which seems to have passed, perhaps only for the 
moment, out of fashion. The way to meet these 
attacks, it seems to me, is to admit their premises, 
and then to inquire what it all matters. If we are 
to accept only one kind of fiction, strong in humour, 
vivid and strenuous in relation to life, standing 
sturdily on two sound legs of common-sense, then 
we must confine ourselves to a very few books, of 
which "Tom Jones" is unquestionably the best. 
But without withdrawing a single epithet of eulogy 
from Fielding and the great realists, we must 
consent to widen our borders sufficiently to embrace 
the fantastic, the unreal, the capricious types of 
154 



"JOHN INGLESANT" 

fiction. The terms which are used nowadays to 
exclude ''John Inglesant" from commendation would 
forbid us to admire '' La Princesse de Cleves " on 
the one hand and '' The Shaving of Shagpat " 
on the other. This is a tendency which must be 
resisted. There is a legitimate pleasure to be found 
in the cultivation of a moral spectacle. It was this, 
a sort of commedia eriidita, which it was Shorthouse's 
aim to produce. He did so in " John Inglesant/' 
and more exquisitely still, it seems to me, in a book 
which has never been properly appreciated, The 
Little Schoolmaster Mark." 

There are certain points of view from which these 
romances must always retain their importance for 
the social student of the mid-Victorian period. They 
are the typical novels of the great awakening of 
middle-class culture in the sixties. In those days 
Oxford might possess its Matthew Arnold, and 
Chelsea its Whistler, and Fairyland its Rossetti and 
its Morris, but it was inconceivable that Birmingham 
could exhibit a school of beauty or a cult of romance. 
The extraordinary success of John Inglesant" re- 
sulted from its answer to the appeal for new light 
from the Midlands, to the cry from local centres 
which still lay in aesthetic darkness, but had heard 
that the dayspring of art was at hand. Shorthouse, 
who liked to talk about his books with his intimate 
friends, often spoke to me about the inception of 
''John Inglesant." He regarded it, I think, as a 
little mysterious, almost supernatural. He did not 
fatuously exaggerate the importance of it, but it was 

155 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



impossible for him to ignore the tremendous re- 
sponse which came back to him from its readers. He 
was a Httle alarmed, immensely pleased, and most of 
all surprised. As he talked of the career of the novel, 
his large solemn face, with its incredible whiskers, 
would take an air of almost pathetic astonishment. 

His attitude was, so far as sobriety would allow 
him to suggest it, that " John Inglesant " was the 
result of a kind of vocation. He was without pride, 
but he really beheved that the subject was given " 
to him, and he was wont to quote of himself, as a 
writer, *^ Blessed is the man whom Thou choosest, 
and causest to approach unto Thee, that he may 
dwell in Thy courts." In 1866 he began to feel that 
he must write a book — he, a shy, Quakerish manu- 
facturer, without literary training, subdued by per- 
sistent ill-health. Nobody suggested or encouraged 
this idea, but it grew ; " if it were only quite a little 
book which nobody read, I should like to write one." 
Then, as he brooded vaguely, he read a paragraph 
somewhere about a knight who forgave the murderer 
of his brother. This was the grain of mustard-seed, 
and it took ten years for it to bourgeon into the great 
Christian romance we all know. Meantime, the 
simplicity of Shorthouse's intellectual life must have 
been something extraordinary. He became ac- 
quainted — this alone shows the vacancy of the world 
in which he had lived — about the age of thirty-two, 
he became acquainted with The Christian Year " 
and the poems of Wordsworth. The visit of a " vene- 
rable and beloved" bishop to Birmingham filled 

156 



"JOHN INGLESANT" 

him with enthusiasm ; his lordship came to tea, con- 
sented to read some passages of Wordsworth aloud in 
the Shorthouses' drawing-room, and was let into the 
secret that his host had " written a book." The bishop 
read it, and said that it " contains a great deal of 
very unusual information/' Another bishop, equally 
affable, went further, and said that he did not know 
whether he had " ever read a book of the kind which 
had struck or interested him more." We seem walk- 
ing among shadows in these faint emotions, and in 
the centre is a half-bewildered Shorthouse, with 
rapturous face upturned, aghast at the prescience of 
these prelates. But when had a famous book a 
stranger birth ? 

"John Inglesant " was privately printed — for no 
publisher would take the risk of it — in 1880. Short- 
house was in his forty-seventh year, and expected 
nothing more of life, save perhaps richer vestmented 
services at church on Sundays, a fresh talk over the 
tea-table with some visiting bishop, and a shy com- 
munication by letter, now and then, with some 
author unknown to him whose works had delighted 
him. But all through these years, in reality, he had 
been insensibly growing into his own type ; he had 
fixed his eyes on a moderate antiquity until he had 
begun to be moderately antique himself. He began 
to inhabit Edgbaston, that serene and highly cultured 
apanage to Birmingham, breathlessly, as if it were 
the gate of Heaven. At length he was actually sum- 
moned to London to breakfast with Mr. Gladstone 
(May 4, 1882), and he went, dreadfully alarmed, but 

157 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



believing it to be his aesthetic privilege and duty to 
obey, much as St. Francis might have left Assisi for 
Rome. And this was the occasion, I think, on which 
he finally adopted his bergamask. He w^as no longer 
Mr. Joseph Henry Shorthouse, the vitriol manu- 
facturer of Birmingham ; he was the author of 
*'John Inglesant," into whose earthen vessel had 
been divinely poured waters for the healing of the 
nations. 

Lest I be misunderstood to speak slightingly, in 
trying to speak carefully, of this excellent man, whom 
I admired and loved, I would immediately proceed 
to say what in his own idea justified the slightly 
solemn way in which he regarded his mission. He 
beheved that he had been raised up to persuade 
people that God prefers culture to fanaticism. He 
asserted this again and again ; the formula is his 
own. He disliked excess of every kind — tumultuous 
benevolence, exaggerated faith, fanatical action. 
He was of opinion that our English life, public 
and private, as it was worked out to a practical 
issue forty years ago, was a mistake. He was 
an epicurean quietist, who believed that the 
main object of every man's life should be to 
conquer and secure for himself peace of mind and 
a solution of the intellectual difficulties which have 
perplexed him. He held that so far as philanthropy, 
or active energy of any sort, was incompatible with 
perfect culture, it was wrong, it was unwholesome 
and immoral. In his attitude towards altruism and 
public pity, the author of ^^John Inglesant," arriving 

158 



"JOHN INGLESANT" 

from the opposite point of the compass, was oddly 
in harmony with Nietzsche, of whom he had never 
heard, and whom he would have looked upon as 
a ruffian. Shorthouse grew, gentle as he was, quite 
courageous when the ideas in ''John Inglesant" 
were attacked. Lord Acton found fault with the 
character of the Jesuit ; Shorthouse replied, '' I 
never reason with Roman Catholics : they live in a 
fairyland of their own" — -a delightful rejoinder. 

The success of " John Inglesant " occurred thirty 
years ago, and the world has a short memory. But 
some of us, alas ! can very clearly recall the 
momentous circumstances of it. Mr. Gladstone, 
swept away by the tide of enthusiasm, yet ambitious 
to guide it, was photographed with the second volume 
of '* John Inglesant" open on his knee, ''the title of 
the book quite plain " even to those outside the 
shop-windows of the vendors. Not provincial 
prelates any longer, but archbishops, cardinals, 
professors, ladies of the first quality bombarded 
Edgbaston with their correspondence. For the 
next five years, at least, Shorthouse was an accepted 
celebrity, the champion of good taste, the unfailing 
source of rather vague but always stimulating 
" thoughts about beauty," the introducer into middle- 
class life and conduct of an extreme refinement. 
It was much to his advantage, and, perhaps, a 
proof of his wisdom, that he resisted all incitements 
to break up his provincial habits and be translated 
to residence in London. It was in Birmingham, 
and only in Birmingham, as an unconscious senti- 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



ment taught him, that he could carry on his 
graceful, intellectual parade without disturbance. 
It depended extremely on exterior symbols and 
superficial attitudes. 

It behoves us to speak with no less respect than 
sympathy of another phase of Shorthouse's character 
into the cultivation of which he threw particular care. 
But in the religious aspect of his genius, too, I find 
the same remarkable cultivation of external charac- 
teristics. Shall we say that when he went to church, 
as he so consistently loved to do, he still wore the 
domino ? I think we must say so, and certainly he 
was never more sincere nor more individual than 
when he dwelt upon the importance of cultivating 
the religious symbol. In literature, in art, in piety, 
it was the becoming attitude which Shorthouse 
valued, not merely for its own sake, but because he 
believed that it naturally led to sympathy and 
delicacy, and perhaps — but this was less essential — 
to faith itself. In the course of my own long talks 
with him, this preference for ceremony over dogma, 
this instinct for the beautiful parade and refined 
self-surrender of religion, grew to seem the central 
feature of Shorthouse's intellectual character, ex- 
plaining everything in his books, in his letters, in 
his personal conduct. He wished, as we know, 
that the agnostic should be persuaded to come to 
the Sacrament, not that he might testify to a creed 
which he did not share, but that *^ some effect of 
sympathy, some magic chord and thrill of sweetness 
should mollify and refresh his heart." 
1 60 



"JOHN INGLESANT" 

There are, of course, a great many sensible and 
strong-minded people who object to this whole 
attitude, who insist that we should be our own plain 
selves, and wear no mask in literature or in religion. 
These people would have had Shorthouse remember 
that he was a manufacturer of vitriol (a quaint fact 
which, I think, Mrs. Shorthouse never happens to 
mention), " behaving as such " quite prosaically 
wherever the wealth of Birmingham was gathered 
together. But, as the poet pathetically puts it, the 
world is full of a number of things," and oceans of 
sulphuric acid will be poured out before we have 
another visionary dreamer like the author of John 
Inglesant." His sequestered existence, which would 
have made him earth-bound if he had not lifted 
himself on the wings of fancy, concentrated his 
peculiarities and intensified a sort of exquisite pro- 
vinciality. Shorthouse was very modest, with a due 
self-consciousness of merit ; he was very simple, 
with a certain love of pomp and artifice ; he clung to 
a sense of the importance of beauty as a safeguard 
against what was small and tiresome in daily life. 
It would be an exaggeration to put Shorthouse in 
the forefront of the authors of the nineteenth century. 
His work is not copious enough and not spontaneous 
enough for that. But he had a real talent for care- 
fully studied and delicately harmonious prose, and 
for that kind of painstaking literary harlequinade 
which we call pastiche. 

It is customary to say that the present generation 
has forgotten Shorthouse. If that is true, let it be 

L i6i 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

reminded of his admirable characteristics by the 
pious labours of his widow. But I think we are apt 
to judge too hastily of what the younger genera- 
tion " is supposed to remember or to forget. The 
impress of Shorthouse's genius seems to me, on the 
contrary, to be patent on many sides of us. We see 
it, surely, in recent books so dissimilar and yet so 
admirable as ^' Ariadne in Mantua " and Zuleika 
Dobson." The bergamot perfume persists ; it would 
be absurd to wish that it should pervade every 
bouquet. But we must hope that " the younger 
generation," that mysterious band of invaders, will 
deign to read the volumes of essays and letters which 
Mrs. Shorthouse presented to them. They will find, 
I admit, a certain faintness, a certain weakness and 
ineffectuality, but it will be astonishing if they do 
not also admit that "an inexpressibly sweet and 
delicate melody has penetrated their senses." 



162 



MANDELL CREIGHTON 

1 843-1 901 



) 



MANDELL CREIGHTON 

In heroic times, when a monarch was about to 
make a solemn adventure into strange dominions, 
he chose one of the wisest and noblest of his 
subjects, and sent him forward as a herald. Those 
who indulge such fancies may have seen a mys- 
terious revival of this custom in the fate which 
removed the admirable Bishop of London exactly 
eight days before his Queen was called upon to 
take the same dread journey. If ceremonial had 
demanded, at the approach of such an event, a 
sacrifice of the most honoured, the most valued, the 
most indispensable, many alternatives would have 
occurred to those on whom the wretched duty of 
choice would have fallen ; but it is probable that 
among the first half-dozen of such precious names 
would have been found that of a Churchman, 
Mandell Creighton. His wholesome virtues, his 
indefatigable vigour, the breadth of his sympathy, 
the strenuous activity of his intellect, pointed him 
out as the man who more than any other seemed 
destined to justify the ways of the national Church 
in the eyes of modern thought, the ecclesiastic who 
more than any other would continue to concihate 
the best and keenest secular opinion. 

165 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



In Creighton, in short, a real prince of the 
Church seemed to be approaching the ripeness of 
his strength. He seemed preparing to spend the 
next quarter of a century in leading a huge and 
motley flock more or less safely into tolerably green 
pastures. Here, then, we thought we had found, 
what we so rarely see in England, a political prelate 
of the first rank. With all this were combined 
gifts of a literary and philosophical order, a 
lambent wit, a nature than which few have been 
known more generous or affectionate, and a con- 
stitution which promised to defy the years. No 
wonder, then, if Creighton had begun to take his 
place as one of the most secure and precious of 
contemporary institutions. In the fullness of his 
force, at the height of his intellectual meridian, he 
suddenly dropped out of the sky. And with all 
the sorrow that we felt was mingled the homely 
poignancy of a keen disappointment. 



I 

Mandell Creighton was the son of Robert 
Creighton, timber merchant of Carlisle, and of 
Sarah Mandell, his wife. On both sides he came 
of sound Cumberland stock. He was born at 
Carlisle, on July 5, 1843. He went to school at 
Durham, and in 1862 he was elected " postmaster " 
of Merton College, Oxford ; that is to say, a scholar 
supported on the foundation. He spent the next 
thirteen years at the university ; and this period 
166 



MANDELL CREIGHTON 

forms one of the most important of the sharply 
marked stages into which Creighton's life was 
divided. Oxford, Embleton, Cambridge, Peter- 
borough, London — it is very seldom that the 
career of a modern man is subdivided by such 
clean sword-cuts through the texture of his personal 
habits. But it was the earliest of these stages which 
really decided the order and character of the others. 
It is easy to think of a Creighton who was never 
Bishop of Peterborough ; it is already becoming 
difficult to recollect at all clearly the one who was 
Dixie Professor at Cambridge. But to think of 
Creighton and not think of Oxford is impossible 
From the beginning of his career to the close of 
it he exhaled the spirit of that university. 

Those who knew Creighton as Bishop of London 
may feel that they knew him as a young tutor at 
Oxford. Those whose friendship with him goes 
back further than mine tell me that as quite a 
young undergraduate he had exactly the same 
manner which we became accustomed to later. He 
never changed in the least essential matter ; he 
grew in knowledge and experience, indeed, but the 
character was strongly sketched in him from the 
very first. Boys are quick in their instinctive 
observation, and almost as a freshman Creighton 
was dubbed the Professor." At Merton they were 
fond of nicknames, and they liked them short ; it 
followed that the future Bishop of London, during 
his undergraduate days, was known among his 
intimates as " the P." He wore glasses, and they 

167 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



gleamed already with something of the flash that 
was to become so famous. In those earliest days, 
when other boys were largely playing the fool, 
Creighton was instinctively practising to play the 
teacher. Already, indeed, he was scholastic in the 
habit of his mind, although never, I think, what 
could, with even an undergraduate's exaggeration, 
be styled priggish." I have heard of the zeal with 
which, at a very early age, quite secretly and un- 
obtrusively, he would help lame (and presumably 
idle) dogs over educational stiles. He was not a 
cricketer, but he took plenty of strenuous exercise 
in the form of walking and rowing. He sought 
glory in the Merton boat, and it is still remembered 
that he was an ornament to a certain nautical club, 
composed of graduates, and called the Ancient 
Mariners. But the maniacal lovers of athletic exer- 
cise can never quote Creighton as one of their 
examples. 

When he became a don — fellow and tutor of his 
college — the real life of Creighton began. The 
chrysalis broke, and the academic butterfly ap- 
peared. With a certain small class of men at 
Merton he was, I believe, for a very short time, 
unpopular. It was a college illustrious for the self- 
abandonment of high spirits, and Creighton had a 
genius for discipHne. But he was very soon re- 
spected, and his influence over each of his particular 
pupils was tremendous. It is interesting to note 
that while everybody speaks of Creighton's 'in- 
fluence " over himself or others, no one ever seems 
i68 



MANDELL CREIGHTON 

to recall any influence " from without acting upon 
Creighton. As to the undergraduates brought under 
his care from 1866 onwards, there is probably not 
one surviving who does not recollect the young 
tutor with respect, and few who do not look back 
upon him with affection. As a disciplinarian he 
was quick and firm ; he was no martinet, but the 
men under his charge soon understood that they 
must work hard and behave themselves. From 
each he would see that he got the best there was 
to give. 

He had great courage ; it was always one of his 
qualities. One of the most remarkable exhibitions 
of it, I think, was his custom — while he was a fellow 
at Merton, and afterwards when he was professor at 
Cambridge — of holding informal meetings in his 
rooms, at which he allowed any species of historical 
conundrum to be put to him, and enforced himself 
to give a reasonable answer to it. The boys would 
try to pose him, of course ; would grub up out-of- 
the-way bits of historical erudition. Creighton was 
always willing " to face the music," and I have never 
heard of his being drawn into any absurd position. 
Few pundits of a science would be ready to undergo 
such a searching test of combined learning and 
common-sense. 

Of Creighton's particular pupils, in those early 
days, two at least were destined to hold positions of 
great prominence. In none of the obituary notices 
of the Bishop of London, so far as I saw, were his 
interesting relations with Lord Randolph Churchill 

169 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



so much as mentioned. A few months after 
Creighton was placed on the governing body of 
Merton, Lord Randolph made his appearance there 
as an undergraduate. He was conspicuous, in those 
days, as an unpromising type of the rowdy noble- 
man. Nobody, not even his own family, believed 
in a respectable future for him ; but Creighton, 
with that singular perspicacity which was one of his 
more remarkable characteristics, divined better 
things in Lord Randolph at once. A friend 
was once walking with the tutor of Merton, when 
down the street came swaggering and strutting, with 
a big nosegay at his buttonhole and a moustache 
curled skywards. Lord Randolph Churchill, dressed, 
as they say, to kill." The friend could not resist 
a gesture of disdain, but Creighton said : You are 
like everybody else : you think he is an awful ass ! 
You are wrong : he isn't. You will see that he will 
have a brilliant future, and what's more definite, a 
brilliant political future. See whether my prophecy 
doesn't turn out true." All through the period of 
Lord Randolph Churchill's amazing harvest of wild 
oats Creighton continued to believe in him. I 
recollect challenging his faith in 1880, when Lord 
Randolph was covering himself, after his second 
election for Woodstock, with ridicule. He replied : 
You think all this preposterous conduct is mere 
folly ? You are wrong : it is only the fermentation 
of a very remarkable talent." Of course he was 
right; and as he lived to rejoice in the rush of his 
meteor heavenwards, he lived to lament the earth- 
170 



MANDELL CREIGHTON 

ward tumble of all the sparks and sticks. Another 
undergraduate of eminence, to whose care Creighton 
was specially appointed, was the Queen's youngest 
son, Leopold, Duke of Albany, to whom he gave 
private lessons in history and literature, and over 
whose mind he exercised a highly beneficial influ- 
ence. It was Prince Leopold who first introduced 
Creighton's name to the Queen, and started her 
interest in his ecclesiastical career. 

It was not until he became a don at Merton, in 
1866, that Creighton formed a group of really 
intimate friends. Then, immediately, his talents 
and his conversation opened to him the whole circle 
of the best minds of Oxford. No one could be 
more attractive in such a society. His affectionate 
nature and his very fresh and vigorous intellect 
made him the most delightful of companions, and 
he was preserved by a certain inherent magnanimity 
from the pettiness which sometimes afflicts university 
coteries. From the very first it was understood that 
he would be an historian (although, by the irony of 
examinations, he had gained only a second class " 
in modern history), but it was not clearly seen how 
this obvious native bent would be made to serve a 
profession. Suddenly, to everybody's great surprise, 
in 1870 he was ordained deacon, and priest in 1873. 
The reasons which led him to take so unexpected a 
step have been frequently the subject of conjecture. 
I shall presently, in endeavouring to form a portrait 
of his character, return to a consideration of this 
most interesting and important question. 

171 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

He was now, at the age of thirty, one of the most 
individual types which Oxford, then abounding in 
men of character, could offer to the observation of 
a visitor. He was already one of the features of 
the society : he was, perhaps, more frequently and 
freely discussed than any other Oxonian of his 
years. He was too strong a man to be universally 
approved of : the dull thought him paradoxical, the 
solemn thought him flippant ; already there was the 
whisper abroad that he was ^'not a spiritually- 
minded man." But the wise and the good, if they 
sometimes may have doubted his gravity, never 
doubted his sincerity ; nor would there be many 
ready to denounce their own appreciation of good 
company by declaring his conversation anything 
but most attractive. 

It was soon after he became a priest — it was in 
the early summer of 1874— that I first met Creighton. 
I was on a visit to Walter Pater and his sisters, who 
were then residing in the suburbs of Oxford, in 
Bradmore Road. To luncheon on Sunday came a 
little party of distinguished guests — Henry Smith 
and his sister. Max Miiller, Bonamy Price (I think), 
and lastly Mr. and Mrs. Creighton ; for he had 
married two years before this. Much the youngest 
person present, I kept an interested silence ; most 
of the talk, indeed, being fitted for local con- 
sumption, and, to one who knew little of Oxford, 
scarcely intelligible. During the course of the 
meal, at which Creighton scintillated with easy 
mastery, I caught his hawk's eye fall upon me once 
172 



MANDELL CREIGHTON 

or twice ; and when it was over, and the ladies had 
left us, he quitted his own friends, and coming over 
to me proposed a walk in the garden. I cannot say 
that this brilliant clergyman, of doubtful age and 
intimidating reputation, was quite the companion I 
should have ventured to choose. But we descended 
on to the greensward ; and as, through that long 
golden afternoon, we walked up and down the 
oblong garden, I gave myself more and more 
unreservedly to the charm of my magnetic com- 
panion, to his serious wit and whimsical wisdom, to 
the directness of his sympathy, and to the firmness 
of his grasp of the cord of life. I was conscious 
of an irresistible intuition that this was one of the 
best as well as one of the most remarkable men 
whom I was ever likely to meet ; and our friendship 
began in that hour. 

II 

From the first it seemed inevitable to count 
Creighton among men of letters, and yet the 
outward evidence of his literary life was very scanty 
to the close of his Oxford period. In all his spare 
time he was preparing for his future work, and 
perhaps he was already publishing anonymously 
some of his papers ; but the fact remains that his 
name did not appear on a title-page until he was 
leaving Oxford, in 1875. I fancy that the difficulty 
he found in concentrating his attention on literature 
was one of several reasons which so suddenly took 

173 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



him to Northumberland in that year. He had 
already begun to plan his magnum opus, '^The 
History of the Papacy/' but he was struck with the 
impossibility of combining the proper composition 
of such a work with the incessant duties of a 
college tutor. Hence, to most people's intense 
surprise, it was one day abruptly announced that 
Creighton had accepted the remote vicarage of 
Embleton. He had given no one an opportunity of 
advising him against the step, but it was known 
that he had strengthened his determination by 
taking counsel with Henry Smith. That wisest of 
men had urged upon him the necessity, if he was 
to enlarge his sphere of activity, and to rise to a 
really commanding position in the Church, of his 
seeing the other side of clerical life, the parochial. 
With the academic side Creighton was sufficiently 
familiar ; what he needed now was the practically 
pastoral. Those who lamented that he should be 
snatched from the gardens and classrooms of 
Oxford, and from their peripatetic ingenuities, had 
to realise that their charming friend was a very 
strong man, predestined to do big things, and that 
the time had come when solitude and fixity were 
needful for his spiritual development. 

So Creighton went off to Embleton ; and one 
remembers the impression among his friends that it 
was something worse for them, in the way of exile, 
than Tomi could have been for the companions of 
Ovid. But there was a great deal to mitigate the 
horrors of exile. In the first place, Embleton was 



MANDELL CREIGHTON 

the best of all the livings in the gift of Merton 
College, and in many respects delightful, socially as 
well as physically. The vicarage was a very 
pleasant house, nested in tall trees, which were all 
the more precious because of the general bareness 
and bleakness of the grey Northumbrian landscape. 
A mile away to the east, broadly ribboned by 
rolling lion-coloured sands, is the sea — the troubled 
Euxine of those parts — with a splendid ruin, the 
keep of Dunstanborough Castle, crouching on a 
green crag. To the west, dreary flat lands are 
bounded, towards evening and on clear mornings, 
by the far-away jags of the Cheviot Hills. On the 
whole, it is a bright, hard, tonical country, lacking 
the voluptuous beauties of the south, but full of 
attraction to a strong and rapid man. It is a land 
but little praised, although it has had one ardent 
lover in Mr. Swinburne, that ^' flower of bright 
Northumberland," that sea-bird of the loud sea 
strand," who sings the strenuous Tale of Balen. 
It always seemed to me that this landscape, this 
bleak and austere Northumbrian vigour, exactly 
suited the genius of Creighton. It made a back- 
ground to him, at all events ; and if I paint his full- 
length portrait in my mind's eye, it is always with 
the tawny sands and dark grey waters of Embleton 
Bay against that falcon's head of his. 

The social attractions of the Northumbrian parish 
were singularly many. Creighton found himself in 
the centre of a bouquet of county families, not a 
ew of which preserved in the present the fine 

175 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



traditions of a long hospitable past. The county 
called, of course, on the new vicar, and was not 
slow to discover that he was a man of power and 
charm. But there were two of the acquaintances 
so formed which ripened rapidly into friendships 
of great importance to the Oxford historian. Some 
five miles south of Embleton vicarage lay Howick, 
the home of that veteran Whig statesman, the third 
Earl Grey, who survived until long after Creighton 
left Northumberland, and who died, at the age of 
ninety-two, in 1894. Much nearer, and within his 
own parish, he had as neighbour Sir George Grey 
of Falloden, Lord John Russell's Home Secretary, 
and father of the present Sir Edward Grey ; he died 
in 1882. With these two aged politicians, of high 
character and long experience, Creighton contrived 
to form relations which in the case of the Falloden 
family became positively intimate. The old Lord 
Grey, although he welcomed the vicar and 
delighted in his conversation, lived somewhat 
above the scope of practical mortal friendship ; but 
his nephew, the present earl — then the hope of 
politicians, and known as Mr. Albert Grey — was 
one of the most frequent visitors at the vicarage. 

At Oxford Creighton had found it impossible to 
devote himself to sustained literary work. The Hfe 
of the tutor of a college is so incessantly disturbed, 
so minutely subdivided, that it is difficult indeed for 
him to produce the least example of a work of 
** long breath." In Northumberland it was not 
that time was unoccupied — wherever Creighton 
176 



MANDELL CREIGHTON 

was, there occupation instantly abounded — but it 
was at least not frittered and crumbled away with 
hourly change of duty. Hence, directly we find 
him at Embleton his literary work begins ; and it is 
during those nine Northumbrian years that he 
appeals to us pre-eminently as a man of letters. He 
began with several little books, of the kind then 
much advocated by the historians with whom he 
had thrown in his lot, such as Freeman and Green. 
It was, in fact, for a series edited by Green that 
Creighton wrote his earliest published work, a httle 
History of Rome, in 1875. The next year saw the 
publication of no fewer than three of his produc- 
tions, two at least of which, The Age of Elizabeth " 
and " The Life of Simon de Montfort," remain 
highly characteristic specimens of his manner. 
Meanwhile he was writing anonymously, but 
largely, in various periodicals, such as the Saturday 
Review and the Aihenceuntf to the last of which 
he was for twelve years a steady contributor. In a 
variety of ways he was labouring to secure the 
recognition of the new science of history as he had 
accepted it from the hands of Stubbs and Freeman. 

His own magnum opus was all the time making 
steady progress, and in 1882 were published the 
first two volumes of ^'The History of the Papacy 
during the Period of the Reformation." Of this book 
the fifth and last volume was sent from Peter- 
borough in 1894. It is a massive monument of 
learning ; it is the work by which Creighton, as 
a pure man of letters, will longest be remembered ; 

M 177 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

it is such a solid contribution to literature as few 
scholars are fortunate enough to find time and 
strength to make. The scope of the book was laid 
down by himself : it was " to bring together 
materials for a judgment of the change which came 
over Europe in the sixteenth century, to which the 
name of * the Reformation ' is loosely given." He 
passed, in his five volumes, from the great schism 
in the Papacy to the dissolution of the Council of 
Trent. It cannot be said that Creighton's " History 
of the Papacy " is a very amusing work. It was 
not intended to entertain. It seems to leave out, of 
set purpose, whatever would be interesting, and it 
tells at length whatever is dull. It was Creighton's 
theory, especially at this early period, that history 
should be crude and unadorned ; not in any sense 
a product of literary art, but a sober presentation of 
the naked truth. Yet even the naked truth about 
what happened (let us say) under Pope John XXII. 
should, one would have supposed, have been amus- 
ing. But Creighton was determined not to stoop 
to the blandishments of anecdote or the siren lure 
of style. 

Busy as he was with literature all through these 
years, he found, or made, at Embleton as much to 
do as would have satisfied most country parsons. 
The temporal wants of his parishioners immediately 
attracted his attention. Embleton has a fishing 
suburb on the sea, called Craster. This was a 
fever-ridden village, sunken in dirt and negligence. 
Creighton, disregarding the growls of the indignant 

178 



MANDELL CREIGHTON 

and suspicious fishermen, took it vigorously in 
hand, drained it, cleaned it, held services there, 
founded — what had never been dreamed of — a 
village school. We used to tell him that Craster 
was his spoilt child. He seemed to hover about it, 
washing its unwilling face, and combing its wilful 
tangles. One watched him pounce down to see 
what Craster was doing, and sweep along the street 
of it like a winged person, ready to castigate or 
caress. It was in the school at Craster that an 
incident occurred which illustrates the difficulties of 
rural education. Creighton, who had been holding 
forth on the errors of ordinary teaching, took a 
London friend into the school at Craster to show 
how sensible and practical the mode was there. A 
mixed and straggling class came up, and the vicar 
asked the top pupil what is " the female of gander/ 
One blank face was followed by another, until far 
down the class a dear little girl put forth a hand with 

Please, sir, gandress ! " Even Creighton, with all 
his humour, was not at first amused, but he con- 
soled himself by thinking that it was " so like Craster." 

But his duties and activities were not confined to 
the hamlets of his own large parish. He seemed at 
last to have the whole neighbourhood in his hands. 
He became the universal referee, the guide, 
philosopher, and friend of the whole of northern 
Northumberland. The county was in process of 
ecclesiastical reconstruction, and Creighton was 
made Rural Dean of Alnwick to help carry it out. 
It was presently formed into a diocese, carved out of 

179 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



the Palatine of Durham, and Creighton was the 
first Honorary Canon of the new Cathedral of 
Newcastle. These titles were straws that marked 
the current of his useful zeal. By and by the 
duke consulted him in everything ; the bishop did 
not stir without him. It almost seemed as though 
his ambition would be satisfied with this sense of 
local beneficence. At the age of forty he was 
content to be simply the most indispensable man- 
of-all-work in a province of Northern England. 
But he was not born to live and die a useful rural 
dean. 

At no time of his life were the mental and moral 
faculties of Creighton more wholesomely exercised 
than during the latter part of his residence in 
Embleton. In after years he pressed too much 
into his life : he was always " on the go " at 
Cambridge, always rushing about at Peterborough, 
while in London he simply lost control of the brake 
altogether and leaped headlong towards the inevit- 
able smash. At Embleton, with his parish and his 
extra-parochial work, his private pupils and his 
books, his Oxford connection as public examiner 
and select preacher, and all the rest of his intense 
and concentrated activity, the machine, though 
already going at a perilous rate, had not begun 
to threaten to get beyond the power of the strong 
and spirited rider to stop at will. I was lucky 
enough, at this very moment of his career, to have 
an opportunity of studying closely the character 
and habits of my friend. In 1882 one of my 
180 



MANDELL CREIGHTON 

children was ordered to a bracing climate, and 
Creighton suggested that nothing could possibly 
brace more tightly than the bright Northumbrian 
shore. He found us lodgings in the village of 
Embleton, and we sojourned at the door of his 
vicarage through the closing summer and the 
autumn of that year. Thus, without presenting the 
embarrassment of guests, who have to be con- 
sidered," we saw something of our fierce, rapid, 
alert, and affectionate vicar every day, and could 
study his character and mind at ease. We could 
share his rounds, romp with his children and our 
own, and engage at nights in the formidable 
discipline of whist. 

Of all my memories of those days — bright, hard, 
hot autumn days, with Creighton in the centre of 
the visual foreground — the clearest are those which 
gather about tremendous walks. He was in his 
element when he could tear himself away from his 
complicated parochial duties, and start off, with his 
mile-devouring stride, full of high cheerfulness, and 
primed for endless discussion of religion and poetry 
and our friends. He was a really pitiless pedestrian, 
quite without mercy. I remember one breathless 
afternoon, after hours upon the march, throwing 
myself on the heather on the edge of Alnwick Moor^ 
and gasping for a respite. Silhouetted high up 
against the sky, Creighton shouted : Come on ! 
Come on ! " And it was then that anguish wrung 
from me a gibe which was always thereafter a joke 
between us. You ought to be a caryatid," I cried, 

i8i 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



"and support some public building ! It's the only 
thing you're fit for I " 

He was particularly fond of driving or taking the 
railway to a remote point, and sweeping a vast round 
on foot, preferably along some river bed. Thus 
have we ascended the Aln, and thus descended the 
more distant Blackadder in Berwickshire, and thus 
have we skirted the infinite serpentings of the Till 
from Chillingham to Fowberry Towers. But of all 
the wild and wine-coloured Northumbrian streams, 
it was the enchanting Coquet which Creighton loved 
the best. Mr. Hamo Thornycroft reminds me of 
an occasion when he was staying with me at 
Embleton, and Creighton took us for a long day's 
tramp up the Coquet to Brinkburn Priory. The 
river rolls and coils itself as it approaches the sea, 
and to shorten our course, the future bishop com- 
manded us to take off our shoes and stockings, and 
ford the waters. There was a ridge of sharp stones 
from bank to bank, with depth of slightly flooded 
river on either side. He strode ahead like a St. 
Christopher, with strong legs naked from the knee, 
but he did not offer to take us on his back. On 
strained and wounded feet we arrived at last at the 
opposite shore, only to be peremptorily told that 
we need not trouble to put on our shoes and stock- 
ings, since we should have to ford the river again, 
after just a mile of stubble. Gentle reader, have 
you ever walked a mile barefoot in stubble ? When 
we reached the foaming Coquet again, the ridged 
stones of the ford seemed paradise in comparison. 
182 



MANDELL CREIGHTON 

Truly the caryatid of Embleton was forged in 
iron. 

Ill 

The call to leave the moors and sandhills of 
Northumberland came abruptly and in an un- 
expected form. A remote benefactor of the Uni- 
versity of Cambridge, and of Emmanuel College in 
particular, Sir Wolstan Dixie, of Christ's Hospital, 
had left a considerable sum of money, which it was 
now determined to use by founding a chair of 
ecclesiastical history. In 1884 this chair was finally 
established, and all that remained was to discover 
the best possible first professor. A board of electors, 
which contained Lightfoot, Seeley, S. R. Gardiner, 
and Mr. Bryce, very carefully considered the claims 
of all the pretendants, and at last determined to do 
an unusual thing, namely, to go outside the uni- 
versity itself, and elect the man who at that moment 
seemed to be, beyond question, the most eminent 
church historian in England. That this should be 
Creighton offers interesting evidence of the steady 
way in which his literary and scholastic gifts had 
been making themselves felt. He was not the 
Cambridge candidate, but Cambridge accepted him 
with a very good grace. Accordingly he returned 
to academic life, and at the same time enjoyed the 
advantage of becoming familiar with the routine of 
a university other than that in which he was brought 
up. But, while he was a professor at Cambridge 

183 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



for seven years, and was all that time entirely loyal 
to his surroundings, Creighton was too deeply im- 
pressed by an earlier stamp ever to be other than 
an Oxford man translated to the banks of the Cam. 

At the very same time that Creighton became 
Dixie Professor, the present writer was elected to a 
post at Cambridge, and for five years we were 
colleagues in the university. Creighton's position 
included the advantages of a senior fellow at 
Emmanuel College, and he had rooms there, which, 
however, he very rarely occupied. He took a house 
for his family about a mile out of Cambridge, in the 
Trumpington direction, and he did his best, by 
multiplying occasions of walking out and in, to 
keep up his habits of exercise. But he certainly 
missed the great pedestrian activities of Embleton. 
His lectures were delivered in the hall of Emmanuel 
College, and I believe that they were fairly well 
attended, as lectures go at Cambridge, by young 
persons of both sexes who were struggling with 
those cruel monsters, the History Tripos and the 
Theology Tripos. But this formed, I must not say 
an unimportant, but I will say an inconspicuous 
part of Creighton's daily life, which in a few months 
became complicated with all sorts of duties. The 
year after he came to Cambridge he rose a step on 
the ladder of clerical promotion by receiving from 
the Queen a canonry at Worcester Cathedral. 
After this, like the villains in melodrama, he lived 
*^ a double life," half in Cambridge, half in Worcester. 

The year 1886 was one of marked expansion in 
184 



MANDELL CREIGHTON 

the fame and force of Creighton. In the first place, 
Emmanuel College nominated him to represent her 
at the celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth 
anniversary of Harvard College, and on this occasion 
he paid his first visit to America. This was an event 
of prime importance to so shrewd and sympathetic 
an observer. I remember that he expressed but one 
disappointment, when he returned, namely, that he 
had not been able to go out West. He was charmed 
with the hospitality and the culture of the East, but, 
as an historian and a student of men, he wanted to 
see the bed-rock of the country. One rather super- 
fine ornament of Massachusetts society lamented 
to him that he must find America so crude.'' 
" My dear sir," said Creighton, in his uncom- 
promising way, "not half so crude as I want to 
find it. We don't travel over the Atlantic for the 
mere fun of seeing a washed-out copy of Europe." 
I recollect observing with interest that what 
Creighton talked of, in connection with America, 
when he returned, were almost entirely social and 
industrial peculiarities, neither blaming nor approv- 
ing, but noting them in his extremely penetrating 
way. 

It was in 1886, too, that he began the work by 
which he became best known to the ordinary 
cultivated reader, namely, the foundation and 
editorship of the English Historical Review, which 
he carried on for five years with marked success. 
Perhaps no single book has done so much as this 
periodical did, in Creighton's capable hands, to 

185 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

familiarise the public with the principles of our 
newer school of scientific historians. At the same 
time he was writing incessantly in other quarters. 
To the Cambridge period belonged the third and 
fourth volumes of "The History of the Papacy" 
(1887), as well as the " Cardinal Wolsey " (1888), 
and several volumes of a more ephemeral char- 
acter. Already, in the last preface to the ^' Papacy," 
there comes an ominous note : " The final revision 
of the sheets has been unfortunately hurried, owing 
to unexpected engagements." Of the rush of " un- 
expected engagements " his friends were now be- 
ginning to be rather seriously conscious. What- 
ever was to be done, as of old Creighton seemed 
to be man-of-all-work to do it. One finds among 
his letters of this period the constant cry of in- 
terruption. He has been on the point of finishing 
this or that piece of work, and it is not done. *^ I 
had a bad day again yesterday," he writes me from 
Worcester, " as I was chartered to lionise the British 
Association over the cathedral. Why do all ' asso- 
ciations ' resolve themselves mainly into ugly women 
with spectacles ? " I see that some of his friends 
think that the Cambridge-Worcester period was a 
restful one ; I cannot say that this is how it struck 
me at the time. 

It closed, at all events, in 1891. Magee, the 
famous Bishop of Peterborough, was made Arch- 
bishop of York in January, and about the same time 
Creighton received from the Queen a canonry at 
Windsor. He left Worcester in consequence, but 
186 



MANDELL CREIGHTON 

he never resided at Windsor, since, before he could 
settle in there, he was called to fill the vacant see of 
Peterborough. Here, then, at last, he had started 
upon the episcopal career which was to carry his 
fame so far. He did not accept the great change in 
haste, although he must long have been prepared 
for it. We have been told, on hysterical authority, 
that Creighton spent a day " in great grief, trying 
hard to find reasons which would justify him in 
refusing Peterborough." This, of course, is sheer 
nonsense ; this is the sort of conventional sentiment 
which was particularly loathsome to Creighton. 
There was no question of "grief" with him, no 
ultimate doubt that he must one day be a bishop ; 
but there was cause for very careful consideration 
whether this was the particular time, and Peter- 
borough the particular place, or not. As a matter 
of fact, the appointment rather awkwardly coin- 
cided with the earliest intimation he had had that 
his iron constitution was not absolutely impermeable 
to exhaustion and decay. It was in April 1891 that 
he was first known to declare that he was " rather 
feeble from overwork," and before he entered upon 
his new duties he spent some time of absolute rest and 
seclusion at Lower Grayswood, the Haslemere home 
of his lifelong friend, Mrs. Humphry Ward. 

He entered upon his episcopal duties, in fact, in 
no very high spirits. He took a dark view of this, 
as he supposed, the turning-point in, or rather the 
sword-cut which should end, his literary career. 
The first time that I saw him after his settling in to 

187 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

his new work — it was in the dim, stragghng garden 
of his palace, late one autumn afternoon — almost 
the first thing I said to him was, And how about 
' The History of the Papacy ' ? " *^ There's a volume 
nearly ready for press," he replied, but how am I 
to finish it ? Do you happen to know a respectable 
German drudge who would buy the lease of it for 
a trifle ? " But surely you will, you must bring 
this book of yours to a close, after so many years ! 

Your holidays, your odds and ends of time " I 

have no odds and ends — I ought to be at this minute 
arranging something with somebody ; and as to my 
holidays, I shall want every hour of them to do 
nothing at all in. Do you know," he said, gripping 
my arm, and glancing round with that glittering 
aquiline gleam of his, " do you know that it is very 
easy not to be a bishop, but that, if you are one, you 
can't be anything else ? Sometimes I ask myself 
whether it would not have been wiser to stay where 
I was ; but I think, on the whole, it was right to 
come here. One is swept on by one's fate, in a 
way ; but one thing I do clearly see — that is an end 
of me as a human being. I have cut myself off. 
My friends must go on writing to me, but I shan't 
answer their letters. I shall get their books, but I 
shan't read 'em. I shall talk about writing books 
myself, but I shan't write 'em. It is my friends I 
miss ; in future my whole life will be spent on 
railway platforms, and the only chance I shall have 
of talking to you will be between the arrival of a 
train and its departure." 
i88 



MANUELL CREIGHTON 

These words proved to be only in part applicable 
to Peterborough. For the first year his time seemed 
to be indeed squandered in incessant journeyings 
through the three counties of his diocese. But 
after the summer of 1892 he became less migratory, 
and indeed for long periods stationary in his palace. 
He had resigned the editorship of the English 
Historical Review into the hands of Samuel Rawson 
Gardiner as soon as he was made bishop ; and for 
some years it seemed as though all literary work had 
come to a stop. But by degrees he grew used to the 
routine of his episcopal duties, and his thoughts 
came back to printer's ink. The fifth volume of the 

Papacy " got itself published without the help of 
any ^• German drudge " ; in 1894 appeared the Hul- 
sean lectures on Persecution and Toleration ; and in 
1896 he published the most popular and the most 
pleasingly written of all his books, his charming 
monograph on Queen Elizabeth. Then came 
London, and swallowed up the historian in the 
active, practical prelate. 

So far as the general public is concerned, the 
celebrity of Creighton began with his translation 
to the see of London, on the promotion of Dr. 
Temple to the Primacy in January 1897. It was in 
the subsequent four years that he contrived to set 
the stamp of his personality on the greatest city 
of the world, and to impress a whole nation with 
his force of character. The obituary notices which 
filled every journal at the time of his death 
abounded in tributes to his ability as Bishop of 

189 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



London, and in anecdotes of his conversation and 
his methods in that capacity. He arrived in his 
monstrous diocese at a time of disturbance and 
revolt ; he followed a prelate who had not troubled 
himself much about ritual. Creighton set two aims 
before him, in attempting to regulate his tempest- 
uous clergy : he wished to secure " a recognisable 
type of the Anglican services," and "a clear under- 
standing about the limits of permissible variation." 
How he carried out these purposes, and how far 
he proceeded in the realisation of his very definite 
dreams, are matters which a thousand pens can 
speak of with more authority than mine. 

But he attempted the physically impossible, and 
he flung his life away in a vain effort to be every- 
where, to do everything, and to act for every one. No 
wonder that Lord Salisbury described Creighton as 

the hardest- worked man in England." His energy 
knew no respite. There should have been some one 
sent to tell him, as the Bishop of Ostia told St. 
Francis of Assisi, that his duty to God was to show 
some compassion to his own body. An iron con- 
stitution is a dangerous gift, and the Bishop of 
London thought his could never fail him. But all 
through 1899, ceaseless public appearances, at 

services, meetings, dinners, installations, and the 
like, one noticed a more and more hungry look 
coming in the hollow^ cheeks and glowing eyes. In 
the summer of 1900 he collapsed, a complete wreck 
in health, and ^after a very painful illness he died 
on January 14, 1901. The sorrow with which the 
190 



MANDELL CREIGHTON 

news of his decease was received was national, and 
the most illustrious of the thousands who sent 
messages of sympathy was Queen Victoria, who, 
only eight days later, was to follow the great bishop 
whose career she had watched with so deep an 
interest. 

IV 

The character and temperament of Dr. Creighton 
were remarkable in many respects, and were often 
the subject of discussion among those who knew 
him little or knew him ill. There is a danger that, 
in the magnificence of the closing scenes of his life, 
something of his real nature may be obscured ; 
that he may be presented to us as such a model of 
sanctity and holy pomp as to lose the sympathy 
which human qualities provoke. There is another 
danger : that, in reaction against this conventionally 
clerical aspect, the real excellence of his heart 
may be done less than justice to. I would, there- 
fore, so far as it lies in my power, draw the man 
as I saw him during a friendship of six-and-twenty 
years, without permitting myself to be dazzled or 
repelled by the dignity which the crosier confers. 
To do this, I must go back to the original crux 
in the career of Creighton — his taking of orders as 
a young man at Oxford. 

To comprehend the position, one must first of 
all recollect how very " churchy " Oxford was 
between i860 and 1870. At that time, it will be 

191 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

remembered, there was scarcely any scope for the 
energies of a resident don unless he was a 
clergyman. It must be admitted, I think, that 
Creighton's nature was not so "serious" at that 
time as it steadily became as years went on. I am 
prepared to believe that he took orders to a great 
extent for college reasons. He had an instinctive 
love of training and teaching, and these were things 
for which a priest had more scope than a layman 
at Oxford. There is no use in minimising the fact 
that his going into the Church caused the greatest 
surprise among his friends, nor in pretending that 
at that time he seemed to have any particular 
vocation for the holy life. He was just a liberal — 
one would have said almost anti-clerical — don, of 
the type which had developed at Oxford towards the 
close of the sixties as a protest against academic 
conservatism. I remember that Pater, discussing 
Creighton about 1875, said to me, " I still think, no 
doubt, that he would have made a better lawyer, or 
even soldier, than priest." 

Those who judged him thus overlooked certain 
features in his character which, even at this early 
period, should have emphasised Creighton's calling 
for the sacerdotal life. His intense interest in 
mankind, his patient and scrupulous observation 
of others, not out of curiosity so much as out of 
a desire to understand their fate, and then to 
ameliorate it — this pointed him out as a doctor of 
souls. And his extreme unselfishness and affec- 
tionateness — no sketch of his character can be 
192 



MANDELL CREIGHTON 

worth a rush which does not insist upon these 
He was always hurrying to be kind to some one, 
combining the honitas with celeritas. Love for 
others, and a lively, healthy, humorous interest 
in their affairs, were really, I should say, the main- 
spring of Creighton's actions. Voltaire somewhere 
exclaims, II faut aimer, c'est ce qui nous soutient, 
car sans aimer il est triste d'etre homme " ; and 
Creighton, who combined something of Voltaire 
with something of St. John the Evangelist, would 
have said the same. It was on the love of his 
fellow-men that he built up the unique fabric of his 
ecclesiastical life. 

And this brings us to the everlasting question, 
which never failed on the lips of critics of 
Creighton — Was he, as they say, " a spiritually- 
minded man " ? This, too, I think we may afford 
to face with courage. In the presence of his 
lambent wit, his keenness of repartee, a certain 
undeniable flightiness in his attitude to many sub- 
jects which are conventionally treated with solem- 
nity, a general jauntiness and gusto in relation to 
mundane things, it must be conceded that the 
epithet which suited him was hardly this. He 
lacked unction ; he was not in any sense a mystic ; 
we cannot imagine him snatched up in an ecstasy 
of saintly vision. Creighton's feet were always 
planted firmly on the earth. But if I resign the 
epithet ^^spiritually-minded," it is only that I may insist 
upon saying that he was spiritually-souled." He 
set conduct above doctrine : there is no doubt of 

N 193 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



that. The external parts of the religious life inter- 
ested him very much. He had an inborn delicacy 
which made it painful to him to seem to check 
the individuality of others, and this often kept him 
from intruding his innermost convictions upon 
others. But no one can have known him well who 
did not perceive, underlying all his external quali- 
ties — his energy, his eagerness, his practical wisdom, 
his very flippancy," if you will — a strenuous 
enthusiasm and purity of soul. 

As a preacher Creighton improved after he 
became a bishop. In earlier days he had been dull 
and dry in the pulpit ; of all exercises of his talent, 
I used to think preaching the one in which he shone 
the least. But he was an interesting lecturer, an 
uncertain although occasionally felicitous orator, 
and an unrivalled after-dinner speaker. To the 
end his talent in the last-mentioned capacity was 
advancing, and on the very latest occasion upon 
which he spoke in public — at the banquet given 
by the Lord Mayor on the occasion of the comple- 
tion of the " Dictionary of National Biography " — 
although his face looked drawn and wasted, he was 
as fascinating as ever. His voice had a peculiar 
sharpness of tone, very agreeable to the ear, and 
remarkably useful in punctuating the speaker's wit. 
On all ceremonial and processional occasions 
Creighton rose to the event. He could so hold 
himself as to be the most dignified figure in 
England ; and this was so generally recognised that 
when, in 1896, the archbishops had to select a 
194 



MANDELL CREIGHTON 

representative of the English Church to attend the 
coronation of the Czar, their choice instantly fell 
upon the Bishop of Peterborough, Accordingly 
he proceeded, in great splendour, to Moscow, and 
he did honour to the Church of England by being 
a principal feature of the show. He was not 
merely one of the most learned as well as perhaps 
the most striking of the foreign bishops present, 
but he was unquestionably the most appreciative. 
He made great friends with the popes and prelates, 
and he was treated with exceptional favour. The 
actual chapel where the coronation took place was 
very exiguous, and the topmost potentates alone 
could find room in it. It was not characteristic of 
Creighton, however, to be left out of anything, and 
the other foreign representatives, to their expressed 
chagrin, saw the Bishop of Peterborough march 
into the holy of holies without them, between two 
of the officiating archimandrites. 

To those who never saw Dr. Creighton some 
picture of his outward appearance may not be 
unwelcome. He was noticeably tall, lean, square- 
shouldered. All through his youth and early 
middle-age his frame was sinewy, like that of a 
man accustomed to athletic exercises, although he 
played no games. His head was held erect, the 
cold blue-grey eyes ever on the alert. His hair 
was red, and he wore a bushy beard, which was 
lately beginning to turn grizzled. The clearness 
of his pink complexion and the fineness and 
smoothness of his skin were noticeable quite late on 

195 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

in his life. The most remarkable feature of his 
face, without doubt, was his curious mouth, sensi- 
tive and mobile, yet constantly closing with a 
snap in the act of will. Nothing was more notable 
and pleasing than the way in which his severe, keen 
face, braced by the aquiline nose to a disciplinarian 
austerity, lightened up and softened with this 
incessantly recurrent smile. Such, in outward 
guise, was one of the strangest, and the most original, 
and the most poignantly regrettable men whom 
England possessed and lost in the last years of the 
nineteenth century. 

1901. 



196 



ANDREW LANG 

I 844-1912 



I 



ANDREW LANG 

Invited to note down some of my recollections of 
Andrew Lang, I find myself suspended between 
the sudden blow of his death and the slow develop- 
ment of memory, now extending in unbroken 
friendship over thirty-five years. The magnitude 
and multitude of Lang's performances, public and 
private, during that considerable length of time 
almost paralyse expression ; it is difficult to know 
w^here to begin or where to stop. Just as his written 
works are so extremely numerous as to make a path- 
way through them a formidable task in bibliography, 
no one book standing out predominant, so his char- 
acter, intellectual and moral, was full of so many 
apparent inconsistencies, so many pitfalls for rash 
assertion, so many queer caprices of impulse, that in 
a whole volume of analysis, which would be tedious, 
one could scarcely do justice to them all. I will 
venture to put down, almost at haphazard, what I re- 
member that seems to me to have been overlooked, or 
inexactly stated, by those who wrote, often very sym- 
pathetically, at the moment of his death, always 
premising that I speak rather of a Lang of from 1877 
to 1890, when I saw him very frequently, than of a 
Lang whom younger people met chiefly in Scotland. 

199 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

When he died, all the newspapers were loud in 
proclaiming his "versatility." But I am not sure 
that he was not the very opposite of versatile. I 
take "versatile" to mean changeable, fickle, con- 
stantly ready to alter direction with the weather-cock. 
The great instance of versatility in literature is 
Ruskin, who adopted diametrically different views 
of the same subject at different times of his life, and 
defended them with equal ardour. To be versatile 
seems to be unsteady, variable. But Lang w^as 
through his long career singularly unaltered ; he 
never changed his point of view ; what he liked 
and admired as a youth he liked and admired as an 
elderly man. It is true that his interests and know- 
ledge were vividly drawn along a surprisingly large 
number of channels, but while there was abundance 
there does not seem to me to have been versatility. 
If a huge body of water boils up from a crater, it 
may pour down a dozen paths, but these will always 
be the same ; unless there is an earthquake, new 
cascades will not form nor old rivulets run dry. In 
some authors earthquakes do take place — as in 
Tolstoy, for instance, andj in S. T. Coleridge — but 
nothing of this kind was ever manifest in Lang, who 
was extraordinarily multiform, yet in his varieties 
strictly consistent from Oxford to the grave. As this 
is not generally perceived, I will take the liberty of 
expanding my view of his intellectual development. 

To a superficial observer in late life the genius of 
Andrew Lang had the characteristics 'which we are 
in the habit of identifying with precocity. Yet he 
200 



ANDREW LANG 

had not been, as a writer, precocious in his youth. 
One slender volume of verses represents all that he 
published in book-form before his thirty-fifth year. 
No doubt we shall learn in good time what he was 
doing before he flashed upon the world of journalism 
in all his panoply of graces, in 1876, at the close of 
his Merton fellowship. He was then, at all events, 
the finest finished product of his age, with the bright 
armour of Oxford burnished on his body to such a 
brilliance that humdrum eyes could hardly bear the 
radiance of it. Of the terms behind, of the fifteen 
years then dividing him from St. Andrews, we know 
as yet but little ; they were years of insatiable acquire- 
ment, incessant reading, and talking, and observing 
— gay preparation for a life to be devoted, as no 
other life in our time has been, to the stimulation of 
other people's observation and talk and reading. 
There was no cloistered virtue about the bright and 
petulant Merton don. He was already flouting 
and jesting, laughing with Ariosto in the sunshine, 
performing with a snap of his fingers tasks which 
might break the back of a pedant, and concealing 
under an affectation of carelessness a literary am- 
bition which knew no definite bounds. 

In those days, and when he appeared for the first 
time in London, the poet was paramount in him. 
Jowett is said to have predicted that he would be 
greatly famous in this line, but I know not what 
evidence Jowett had before him. Unless I am 
much mistaken, it was not until Lang left Balliol 
that his peculiar bent became obvious. Up to that 

201 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



time he had been a promiscuous browser upon 
books, much occupied, moreover, in the struggle 
with ancient Greek, and immersed in Aristotle and 
Homer. But i4i the early days of his settlement at 
Merton he began to concentrate his powers, and 
I think there were certain influences which were 
instant and far-reaching. Among them one was 
pre-eminent. When Andrew Lang came up from 
St. Andrews he had found Matthew Arnold occupying 
the ancient chair of poetry at Oxford. He was a 
listener at some at least of the famous lectures which, 
in 1865, were collected as " Essays in Criticism " ; 
while one of his latest experiences as a Balliol under- 
graduate was hearing Matthew Arnold lecture on 
the study of Celtic literature. His conscience was 
profoundly stirred by Culture and Anarchy" (1869) ; 
his sense of prose-form largely determined by 
" Friendship's Garland " (1871). I have no hesita- 
tion in saying that the teaching and example of 
Matthew Arnold prevailed over all other Oxford 
influences upon the intellectual nature of Lang, 
while, although I think that his personal acquaintance 
with Arnold was very slight, yet in his social manner 
there was, in early days, not a little imitation of 
Arnold's aloofness and superfine delicacy of address. 
It was unconscious, of course, and nothing would 
have enraged Lang more than to have been accused 
of imitating Uncle Matt." 

The structure which his own individuality now 
began to build on the basis supplied by the learning 
of Oxford, and in particular by the study of the 
202 



ANDREW LANG 

Greeks, and "dressed" by courses of Matthew Arnold, 
was from the first eclectic. Lang eschewed as com- 
pletely what was not sympathetic to him as he 
assimilated what was attractive to him. Those who 
speak of his "versatility" should recollect what 
large tracts of the literature of the world, and even 
of England, existed outside the dimmest apprehen- 
sion of Andrew Lang. It is, however, more useful 
to consider what he did apprehend ; and there were 
two English books, published in his Oxford days, 
which permanently impressed him : one of these 
was "The Earthly Paradise," the other D. G. 
Rossetti's " Poems." In after years he tried to 
divest himself of the traces of these volumes, but he 
had fed upon their honey-dew and it had permeated 
his veins. 

Not less important an element in the garnishing of 
a mind already prepared for it by academic and 
assthetic studies was the absorption of the romantic 
part of French literature. Andrew Lang in this, as 
in everything else, was selective. He dipped into the 
wonderful lucky-bag of France wherever he saw the 
glitter of romance. Hence his approach, in the early 
seventies, was threefold : towards the mediaeval lais 
and chansons^ towards the sixteenth-century Pleiade, 
and towards the school of which Victor Hugo was 
the leader in the nineteenth century. For along time 
Ronsard was Lang's poet of intensest predilection ; 
and I think that his definite ambition was to be the 
Ronsard of modern England, introducing a new 
poetical dexterity founded on a revival of pure 

203 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



humanism. He had in those days what he lost, or at 
least dispersed, in the weariness and growing melan- 
cholia of later years — a splendid belief in poetry as a 
part of the renown of England, as a heritage to be re- 
ceived in reverence from our fathers, and to be passed 
on, if possible, in a brighter flame. This honest and 
beautiful ambition to shine as one of the permanent 
benefactors to national verse, in the attitude so nobly 
sustained four hundred years ago by Du Bellay and 
Ronsard, was unquestionably felt by Andrew Lang 
through his bright intellectual April, and supported 
him from Oxford times until 1882, when he pub- 
lished ^' Helen of Troy." The cool reception of that 
epic by the principal judges of poetry caused him 
acute disappointment, and from that time forth he 
became less eager and less serious as a poet, more and 
more petulantly expending his wonderful technical 
gift on fugitive subjects. And here again, when one 
comes to think of it, the whole history repeated itself, 
since in ^* Helen of Troy " Lang simply suffered as 
Ronsard had done in the " Franciade." But the 
fact that 1882 was his year of crisis, and the tomb of 
his brightest ambition, must be recognised by every 
one who closely followed his fortunes at that time. 

Lang's habit of picking out of literature and of life 
the plums of romance, and these alone, comes to be, 
to the dazzled observer of his extraordinarily vivid 
intellectual career, the principal guiding line. This 
determination to dwell, to the exclusion of all other 
sides of any question, on its romantic side is alone 
enough to rebut the charge of versatility. Lang was 
204 



ANDREW LANG 



in a sense encyclopcedic ; but the vast dictionary of 
his knowledge had blank pages, or pages pasted 
down, on which he would not, or could not, read 
what experience had printed. Absurd as it sounds, 
there was always something maidenly about his mind, 
and he glossed over ugly matters, sordid and dull 
conditions, so that they made no impression what- 
ever upon him. He had a trick, which often exas- 
perated his acquaintances, of declaring that he had 

never heard " of things that everybody else.was very 
well aware of. He had never heard the name " of 
people he disliked, of books that he thought tire- 
some, of events that bored him ; but, more than this, 
he used the formula for things and persons whom he 
did not wish to discuss. I remember meeting in the 
street a famous professor, who advanced with up- 
lifted hands, and greeted me with *^ What do you 
think Lang says now ? That he has never heard of 
Pascal ! " This merely signified that Lang, not 
interested (at all events for the moment) in Pascal 
nor in the professor, thus closed at once all 
possibility of discussion. 

It must not be forgotten that we have lived to see 
him, always wonderful indeed, and always passion- 
ately devoted to perfection and purity, but worn, 
tired, harassed by the unceasing struggle, the life- 
long slinging of sentences from that inexhaustible 
ink-pot. In one of the most perfect of his poems, 
" Natural Theology," Lang speaks of Cagn, the great 
hunter, who once was kind and good, but who was 
spoiled by fighting many things. Lang was never 

205 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

spoiled," but he was injured ; the surface of the 
radiant coin was rubbed by the vast and intermin- 
able handling of journalism. He was jaded by the 
toil of writing many things. Hence it is not possible 
but that those who knew him intimately in his later 
youth and early middle-age should prefer to look 
back at those years when he was the freshest, the 
most exhilarating figure in living literature, when a 
star seemed to dance upon the crest of his already 
silvering hair. Baudelaire exclaimed of Theophile 
Gautier : Homme heureux ! homme digne d'envie ! 
il n'a jamais aime que le Beau!" and of Andrew 
Lang in those brilliant days the same might have 
been said. As long as he had confidence in beauty 
he was safe and strong ; and much that, with all 
affection and all respect, we must admit was rasping 
and disappointing in his attitude to literature in 
his later years, seems to have been due to a decreas- 
ing sense of confidence in the intellectual sources 
of beauty. It is dangerous, in the end it must be 
fatal, to sustain the entire structure of life and though 
on the illusions of romance. But that was wha 
Lang did — he built his house upon the rainbow. 

The charm of Andrew Lang's person and compan" 
was founded upon a certain lightness, an essential 
gentleness and elegance which were relieved by a 
sharp touch ; just as a very dainty fruit may be pre- 
served from mawkishness by something delicately 
acid in the rind of it. His nature was slightly in- 
human ; it was unwise to count upon its sympathy 
beyond a point which was very easily reached in 
206 



ANDREW LANG 

social intercourse. If any simple soul showed an 
inclination, in eighteenth-century phrase, to repose 
on the bosom " of Lang, that support was imme- 
diately withdrawn, and the confiding one fell among 
thorns. Lang was like an Angora cat, whose gentle- 
ness and soft fur, and general aspect of pure 
amenity, invite to caresses, which are suddenly met 
by the outspread paw with claws awake. This un- 
certain and freakish humour was the embarrassment 
of his friends, who, however, were preserved from 
despair by the fact that no malice was meant, and 
that the weapons were instantly sheathed again in 
velvet. Only, the instinct to give a sudden slap, half 
in play, half in fretful caprice, was incorrigible. No 
one among Lang's intimate friends but had suffered 
from this feline impulse, which did not spare even 
the serenity of Robert Louis Stevenson. But, tire- 
some as it sometimes was, this irritable humour 
seldom cost Lang a friend who was worth preserving. 
Those who really knew him recognised that he was 
always shy and usually tired. 

His own swift spirit never brooded upon an 
offence, and could not conceive that any one else 
should mind what he himself minded so little and 
forgot so soon. Impressions swept over him very 
rapidly, and injuries passed completely out of his 
memory. Indeed, all his emotions were too fleeting, 
and in this there was something fairy-like ; quick 
and keen and blithe as he was, he did not seem 
altogether Hke an ordinary mortal, nor could the 
appeal to gross human experience be made to him 

207 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

with much chance of success. This, doubtless, is 
why almost all imaginative literature which is 
founded upon the darker parts of life, all squalid 
and painful tragedy, all stories that " don't end well,'^ 
all religious experiences, all that is not superficial 
and romantic, was irksome to him. He tried some- 
times to reconcile his mind to the consideration of 
real life ; he concentrated his matchless powers on 
it ; but he always disliked it. He could persuade 
himself to be partly just to Ibsen or Hardy or 
Dostoieffsky, but what he really enjoyed was Dumas 
perCy because that fertile romance-writer rose serene 
above the phenomena of actual human experience. 
We have seen more of this type in English literature 
than the Continental nations have in theirs, but even 
we have seen no instance of its strength and weak- 
ness so eminent as Andrew Lang. He was the fairy 
in our midst, the wonder-working, incorporeal, and 
tricksy fay of letters, who paid for all his wonderful 
gifts and charms by being not quite a man of like 
passions with the rest of us. In some verses which 
he scribbled to R.L.S. and threw away, twenty years 
ago, he acknowledged this unearthly character, 
and, speaking of the depredations of his kin, h 
said : 

Faith, they might steal me, zvi^ ma will. 

And, ken'd I ony Fairy hill, 

Fd lay me down there, snod and stilt, 

Their land to win ; 
For, man, Vve maistly had my Jill 

O' this worlds din, 

208 



ANDREW LANG 



His wit had something disconcerting in itsimpish- 
ness. Its rapidity and sparkle were dazzling, but it 
was not quite human ; that is to say, it conceded 
too little to the exigencies of flesh and blood. If 
we can conceive a seraph being funny, it would be 
in the manner of Andrew Lang. Moreover, his wit 
usually danced over the surface of things, and rarely 
penetrated them. In verbal parry, in ironic mis- 
understanding, in breathless agility of topsy-turvy 
movement, Lang was like one of Milton's " yellow- 
skirted fays," sporting with the helpless, moon- 
bewildered traveller. His wit often had a depress- 
ing, a humiliating effect, against which one's mind 
presently revolted. I recollect an instance which 
may be thought to be apposite : I was passing 
through a phase of enthusiasm for Emerson, whom 
Lang very characteristically detested, and I was so 
ill-advised as to show him the famous epigram 
called ^' Brahma." Lang read it with a snort of 
derision (it appeared to be new to him), and im- 
mediately he improvised this parody : 

If the wild bowler thinks he bowls. 
Or if the batsman thinks he^s bowled^ 

They know not, poor misguided souls. 
They J too, shall perish unconsoled. 

I am the batsman and the bat, 
I dm the bowler and the ball, 

The umpire, the pavilion cat. 

The roller, pitch, and stumps, and all. 

This would make a pavilion cat laugh, and I felt 
that Emerson was done for. But when Lang had left 

o 209 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



me, and I was once more master of my mind, I 
reflected that the parody was but a parody, wonderful 
for its neatness and quickness, and for its seizure of 
what was awkward in the roll of Emerson's diction, 
but essentially superficial. However, what would 
wit be if it were profound ? I must leave it 
there, feeling that I have not explained why Lang's 
extraordinary drollery in conversation so often left 
on the memory a certain sensation of distress. 

But this was not the characteristic of his humour 
at its best, as it was displayed throughout the 
happiest period of his work. If, as seems possible, 
it is as an essayist that he will ultimately take his 
place in English literature, this element will continue 
to delight fresh generations of enchanted readers. 
I cannot imagine that the preface to his translation 
of " Theocritus," '^Letters to Dead Authors," "In 
the Wrong Paradise," " Old Friends," and " Essays 
in Little " will ever lose their charm ; but future 
admirers will have to pick their way to them through 
a tangle of history and anthropology and mythology, 
where there may be left no perfume and no sweet- 
ness. I am impatient to see this vast mass of writing 
reduced to the limits of its author's delicate, true, 
but somewhat evasive and ephemeral genius. How- 
ever, as far as the circumstances of his temperament 
permitted, Andrew Lang has left with us the memory 
of one of our most surprising contemporaries, a 
man of letters who laboured without cessation from 
boyhood to the grave, who pursued his ideal with 
indomitable activity and perseverance, and who was 

2IO 



ANDREW LANG 



never betrayed except by the loftiness of his own 
endeavour. Lang's only misfortune was not to be 
completely in contact with life, and his work will 
survive exactly where he was most faithful to his 
innermost illusions. 

1912. 



211 



WOLCOTT BALESTIER 

1861-1891 



WOLCOTT BALESTIER 

It was early in 1889 that, on an evening which 
must always remain memorable to some of us, two 
or three English writers met, at the house of Mrs. 
Humphry Ward, a young American man of business 
who had just made her acquaintance. Among 
those who then saw Wolcott Balestier for the 
first time were Mr. Henry James (soon to become 
his closest and most valued friend in England) and 
the writer of these pages. As I look back upon that 
evening, and ask myself what it was in the eager 
face I watched across the table-cloth which could 
create so instant a thrill of attraction, so unresisted 
a prescience of an intimate friendship ready to 
invade me, I can hardly find an answer. The type 
was not of that warm and sympathetic class so 
familiar in our race ; neither in colour, form, nor 
character was it English. In later moments one 
analysed that type — a mixture of the suave colonial 
French and the strained, nervous New England 
blood. But, at first sight, a newly presented 
acquaintance gained an impression of Wolcott 
Balestier as a carefully dressed young-old man or 
elderly youth, clean-shaven, with smooth dark hair, 
thin nose, large sensitive ears, and whimsically 

215 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



mobile mouth. The singular points in this general 
appearance, however, were given by the extreme 
pallor of the complexion and by the fire in the 
deeply-set dark blue eyes ; for the rest, a spare 
and stooping figure, atonic, ungraceful, a general 
physique ill-matched with the vigour of will, the 
extreme rapidity of graceful mental motion, the 
protean variety and charm of intellectual vitality, 
that inhabited this frail bodily dwelling. To the very 
last, after seeing him almost daily for nearly three 
years, I never could entirely lose the sense of the ca- 
pricious contrast between this wonderful intelligence 
and the unhelpful frame that did it so much wrong. 

Charles Wolcott Balestier had just entered his 
twenty-eighth year when first I knew him. He was 
born at Rochester, New York, on December 13, 
1861. His paternal great-grandfather had been a 
French planter in the island of Martinique ; his 
maternal grandfather, whom he is said to have 
physically resembled, was a jurist who completed 
commercial negotiations between the United States 
and Japan. Of his early life I know but little, 
Wolcott Balestier was at school in his native city, 
and at college for a short time at Cornell Uni- 
versity, but his education was, I suppose, mainly 
that of life itself. After his boyhood he spent a 
few years on the outskirts of literature. I learn 
from Mr. W. D. Howells that at the age of seventeen 
he began to send little tales and essays to the office 
of the Atlantic Monthly. He edited a newspaper, 
later on, in Rochester ; he published in succession 
216 



WOLCOTT BALESTIER 

three short novels ; and he was employed in the 
Astor Library in New York. 

All these incidents, however, have little sig- 
nificance. But in the winter of 1882 he made an 
excursion to Leadville, which profoundly impressed 
his imagination. The Colorado air was more than 
his weak chest could endure, and he soon came 
back ; but two years later he made a second trip to 
the West, in company with his elder sister, and this 
lasted for many months. He returned, at length, 
through Mexico and the Southern States. The 
glimpses that he gained in 1885 of the fantastic life 
of the West remained to the end of his career the 
most vivid and exciting which his memory retained. 
The desire to write earnestly seized him, and it was 
in Colorado that the first crude sketch of the book 
afterwards re-written as " Benefits Forgot " was 
composed. Soon after his return to New York he 
became known to and highly appreciated by men in 
business, and in the winter of 1888 he came over to 
England to represent a New York publisher and 
to open an office in London. 

Of his three full years in the latter city I can 
speak with some authority, for I was in close relation 
with him during the greater part of that time. He 
arrived in England without possessing the acquaint- 
ance of a single Englishman, and he died leaving 
behind him a wider circle of literary friends than, 
probably, any other living American possessed. 
He had an ardent desire to form personal con- 
nections with those whose writings in any way 

217 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



interested him — to have his finger, as he used to 
say, on the pulse of Hterature — and the pecuharity 
of his position in London, as the representative 
of an American publishing-house, not merely 
facilitated the carrying out of this ambition, but 
turned that pleasure into a duty. He possessed a 
singularly winning mode of address with strangers 
whose attention he wished to gain. It might be 
described as combining the extreme of sympathetic 
resignation with the self-respect needful to make 
that resignation valuable. It was in the nature of 
the business in which Balestier was occupied during 
his stay in England that novels (prose fiction in all 
its forms) should take up most of his thoughts. 
I believe that there was not one English novelist, 
from George Meredith and Mr. Thomas Hardy 
down to the most obscure and ^* subterranean " 
writer of popular tales, with whom he did not 
come into relations of one sort or another, but 
sympathetic and courteous in every case. He was 
able to preserve in a very remarkable degree his 
fine native taste in literature, while conscientiously 
and eagerly "trading" for his friends in New York 
in literary goods which were not literature at all. 
This balance of his mind constantly amazed me. 
His lofty standard of literary merit was never 
lowered ; it grew, if anything, more exacting ; 
yet no touch of priggishness, of disdain, coloured 
his intercourse with those who produce what the 
public buys in defiance of taste, the honest pur- 
veyors of deciduous fiction. 
2i8 



WOLCOTT BALESTIER 

Balestier's ambition on landing, an obscure youth, 
in an England which had never heard of him was 
no less than to conquer a place of influence in the 
centre of English literary society. Within three 
years he had positively succeeded in gaining such 
a position, and was daily strengthening it. There 
has been no such recent invasion of London ; he 
was not merely, as we used to tell him, ^'one 
of our conquerors," but the most successful of 
them all. 

What was so novel and so delightful in his 
relations with authors was the exquisite adroitness 
with which he made his approaches. He never 
lost a shy conquest through awkwardness or rough- 
ness. If an anthology of appreciations of Wolcott 
Balestier could be formed, it would show that to 
each literary man and woman whom he visited he 
displayed a tincture of his or her own native colour. 
Soon after his death I received a letter from the 
author of ^'John Inglesant," to whom in the winter 
of 1890 I had given Balestier a letter of intro- 
duction. " The impression he left upon me," says 
Mr. Shorthouse, was so refined and delicate in 
its charm that I looked back to it all through that 
terrible winter with a bright recollection of what is 
to me the most delightful of experiences, a quiet 
dinner with a sympathetic and intelligent man." 

Our notices of the dead tend to grow stereotyped 
and featureless. We attribute to them all the virtues, 
all the talents, but shrink from the task of dis- 
crimination. But the sketch which should dwell on 

219 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



Wolcott Balestier mainly as on an amiable young 
novelist cut off in the flower of his literary youth 
would fail more notably than usual in giving an 
impression of the man. Of his literary work I 
shall presently speak : to praise it with exaggeration 
would, as I shall try to show, be unwise. But all 
men are not mere machines for writing books, and 
Balestier, pre-eminently, was not. The character 
was far more unique, more curious, than the mere 
talent for composition, and what the character was 
I must now try to describe. He had, in the first 
place, a business capacity which in its degree may 
not be very rare, if we regard the whole industrial 
field, but which as directed to the profession of 
publication was, I am not afraid to say, unique. 
He glanced over the field of the publishing-houses, 
and saw them all divided in interests, pulling 
various ways, impeding one another, sacrificing 
the author to their traditions and their lack of 
enterprise. 

Balestier dreamed great dreams of consolidation, 
at which those who are incapable of the effort of 
dreaming may now smile, if they will. But no one 
who is acquainted with details to which I must 
not do more than allude here will deny that he 
possessed many of the characteristics needed to 
turn his dreams into facts. He held in his grasp the 
details of the trade, yet combined with them an 
astonishing power of generalisation. I have never 
known any one connected with the art or trade of 
literature who had anything like his power of 
220 



WOLCOTT BALESTIER 

marshalling before his memory, in due order, all the 
militant English writers of the moment, small as 
well as great. There they stood in seemly rows, the 
names that every Englishman honours and never 
buys, the names that every Englishman buys and 
never honours. Balestier knew them all, knew their 
current value, appraised them for future quotation, 
keeping his own critical judgment, all the while, 
unbent, but steadily suspended. 

To reach this condition of experience time, of 
course, had been required, but really very little. 
Within twelve months he knew the English book- 
market as, probably, no Englishman knew it. Into 
this business of his he threw an indomitable will, 
infinite patience, a curious hunting or sporting zest, 
and what may be called the industrial imagination. 
His mind moved with extreme rapidity ; he never 
seemed to require to be told a fact or given a hint 
twice. When you saw him a few days later the fact 
had gathered to itself a cluster of associate supports, 
the hint had already ripened to action. I may quote 
an instance which has a pathetic interest now. In 
the autumn of 1889, fresh from reading "Soldiers 
Three," I told him that he ought to keep his eye on 
a new Indian writer, Rudyard Kipling. '^Rudyard 
Kipling ? " he answered impatiently ; " is it a man 
or a woman ? What's its real name ? " A little 
nettled, I said, " You will find that you won't be 
allowed to go on asking questions like those. He is 
going to be one of the greatest writers of the day." 
"Pooh, pooh!" Balestier replied, "now you are 

221 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



shouting ! " And no further reference was made to 
the subject. But three days later I found a pile of 
the blue Indian pamphlets on his desk, and within a 
week he had added the future collaborator in '^The 
Naulahka" to the troop of what he used to call 
his personal conquests." 

No striking qualities, as we know, are without 
their defects. The most trying peculiarity of 
Wolcott Balestier was the result of his rapidity in 
decisive manoeuvring. He had cultivated such a 
perfect gift for being all things to all men, discretion 
and tact were so requisite in his calling, that he fell, 
and that increasingly, into the error of excessive 
reticence. This mysterious secrecy, which grew on 
him towards the last, his profound caution and 
subtlety, would doubtless have become modified ; 
this feature of his character needed but to become 
a little exaggerated, and he would himself have 
perceived and corrected it. There was perhaps a 
little temptation to vanity in the case of a young 
man possessed of so many secrets, and convinced of 
his worth as a confidential adviser. He " had the 
unfortunate habit of staring very hard at his own 
actions, and when he found his relations to others 
refining themselves under a calcium light, he en- 
deavoured to put up the screen." These words from 
a story of his own may be twisted into an applica- 
tion that he never intended. In the light of his 
absolute and unshaken discretion, of his ardent 
loyalty to his particular friends, of his zeal for the 
welfare of others, this little tortuous foible for 

222 



WOLCOTT BALESTIER 

mystery dwindles into something almost too small 
to be recorded. 

For the ordinary relaxations of mankind, es- 
pecially for the barbarous entertainments of us 
red-blooded islanders, he had an amused and 
tolerant disdain. He rode a little, but he had no 
care for any other sort of exercise. He played 
no games, he followed no species of sport. His 
whole soul burned in his enterprises, in his vast 
industrial dreams. If he tried golf, it was because 
he was fond of Mr. Norris ; if he discussed agri- 
culture and Wessex, it was because that was the 
way to the heart of Mr. Thomas Hardy. Nothing 
came amiss to him in conversation, and he was so 
apt a learner that he would talk charmingly of 
politics, of wine, of history, even of the fine arts. 
But only three things really occupied his mind — 
the picturesque procession of the democratic life 
of to-day, the features and fortunes of his friends, 
and those commercial adventures for the conduct 
of which he had so extraordinary a genius. 

It is by design that I have not spoken hitherto 
of his own literary productions. It would be easier, 
I think, to exaggerate their positive value than to 
overrate the value of the man who wrote them. 
The three novels which he published in America 

A Patent Philtre," 1884 ; A Fair Device," 1884 ; 
^' A Victorious Defeat," 1886) were the outcome of 
an admiration for the later novels of Mr. W. D. 
Howells, but they had not the merit even of being 
good imitations. Balestier was conscious of their 

223 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



weakness, and he deliberately set himself to forget 
them. Meanwhile the large issues of life in the West 
and its social peculiarities fascinated him. The result 
of his study of the Leadville of 1885 will be found in 
a novel called Benefits Forgot/' which was finished 
in 1890, and published in 1892. During the last 
year of his life Wolcott Balestier took to com- 
position again with much fervour and assiduity. 
There is no question that his intimate friendship 
with so eager and brilliant a writer of tales as Mr. 
Rudyard Kipling, who, as is known, became his 
brother-in-law, was of vast service to him. The 
short stories of his last year showed a remark- 
able advance. There remains the part of ^'The 
Naulahka" which he contributed, but on this it 
is impossible here to dwell. What he might have 
done, if he had lived ten years longer, none of us 
can conjecture. 

The melancholy task remains to me of telling 
how so much of light and fire was extinguished. 
He habitually overworked himself to such a degree, 
the visible mental strain was so obvious, that his 
health had long given us the deepest anxiety. I, 
for one, for a year had almost ceased to hope that 
he could survive. Yet it now appears, both from 
the record of his family and from the opinion of 
the German doctors, that there was no organic 
mischief, and that he might, in spite of his weak- 
ness, have lived to old age. He was overworked, 
but he never worried ; he was exhausted, but he 
did not experience the curse of sleeplessness. In 
224 



WOLCOTT BALESTIER 

November, however, after some days of indis- 
position, looking all the while extremely ill, he 
left London for business reasons, and went to 
Berlin. We heard of him a few days later as laid 
up in Dresden, His mother and sisters imme- 
diately went to him from Paris. The disease proved 
to be typhoid fever in a most malignant form, and 
on the twenty-first day, Sunday, December 6, 1891, 
he died, having not quite completed his thirtieth 
year. He lies buried in the American cemetery at 
Dresden, and our anticipations lie with him : 

For what was he ? Some novel power 

Sprang up for ever at a touchy 

And hope could never hope too much 
In watching him from hour to hour. 

1892. 



P 



225 



CARL SNOILSKY 

1841-1903 



CARL SNOILSKY 



AND SOME RECENT SWEDISH POETS 

Sweden has followed the general tradition of the 
northern countries of Europe in the history of its 
poetry. Its earliest writers of the seventeenth 
century cultivated the didactic verse then generally 
prevalent, and were mainly occupied in redeeming 
the Swedish language from roughness and barbarism. 
Such poets as Stjernhjelm and Samuel Columbus, 
contemporaries of Dryden, Malherbe, and Logau, 
offered to their readers little lyrical faculty and less 
imaginative passion ; they tended to the diffuse, the 
verbose, the rhetorical, but they polished and 
sharpened the instrument, they made the language 
of their country one peculiarly well prepared for 
the variety and harmony of the poetic art. Later 
poets looked to France for inspiration ; there was a 
Ronsardist period and an Augustan period. Under 
Queen Ulrika Eleonora, Pope and Addison became 
the arbiters of poetic elegance. The close of the 
eighteenth century saw the arrival of Bellmann, the 
improvisatore of dithyrambs, a lyrical writer of the 
highest originality. Then, like her neighbours, 
Sweden experienced a change of heart ; she passed 

229 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



through the throes of conviction of classic sin, and 
conversion to romantic righteousness. And all this 
time her language was becoming more mellifluous, 
more exquisitely balanced and burnished, more 
dangerously perfect in its technical softness and 
smoothness. 

For fifty years of the early nineteenth century the 
Swedes distinguished themselves in several of the 
highest branches of poetical literature. But by 
1850 Tegner, Geijer, and Franzen were dead, and 
the lesser men around them were growing old. 
Poets contmued to appear, but they made less and 
less impression. Between i860 and 1870 the 
decadence of Swedish verse was conspicuous, and 
many observers believed that it was fatal. The 
language seemed to have worn itself out, and its 
facile sweetness to have become mawkish. Of the 
writers of that time, few are now read or much 
remembered. Their poetry was orthodox in style 
and tone, optimistic, commonplace. The best of it 
was remarkable for beauty of form, and certain 
pieces have been kept alive, and will probably 
always exist, by virtue of their delicate workmanship. 
But these young bards lacked enthusiasm and 
energy ; their pathetic and graceful verses had no 
force ; they cultivated, often in compositions of 
very trifling melody, what they called idealism," a 
pretty wilful ignorance of all the facts of life. 

A natural consequence was that the ordinary 
sensual man lost interest in verse, and a conscious- 
ness of a lack of hold upon the public increased 
230 



CARL SNOILSKY 

the mediocrity of the poets. An extraordinary 
prudishness, tameness, and sentimentaHty spread 
over all departments of Swedish literature, and it 
seemed very likely, in 1870, that poetry might cease 
to be read and then to be written. Those pale 
and pure verses, without evidence of passion or 
experience, which alone were in fashion, were felt 
to be absurd. In the midst of this decadence, as 
though to arrest its ravages, and to make a bridge 
over from one vivid age to another, there made his 
appearance a lyrical poet of unquestionable force 
and fire. This was Count Carl Snoilsky, of whom 
it is hard to decide whether he was the last of an 
earlier age or the precursor of a coming generation. 
He was, at all events, genuinely inspired. Up to 
that time the best colour in Swedish poetry had 
been but chilly, an arrangement of the hues of the 
arctic aurora. But Snoilsky — the young Snoilsky — 
was intoxicated with life and joy, clad with the vine 
and stained with the grape, a figure like one of the 
followers of Bacchus, " crown'd with green leaves 
and faces all on flame," in Keats' glorious ode. 
This is how Snoilsky appeared, about 1870, to those 
who watched the signs of the times in Swedish 
poetry. 

This remarkable man was a Swede of Slav 
extraction, whose ancestors, Znojilsek by name, had 
emigrated from Carinthia in the early part of the 
seventeenth century. The family was presently 
ennobled, and became distinguished in Swedish 
diplomacy. The father of the poet was one of the 

231 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



most conservative of the peers in King Oscar I.'s 
Upper House. It was in an atmosphere of Toryism, 
of aristocratic etiquette, that Carl Johan Gustaf 
Snoilsky was born, in the parish of Klara in 
Stockholm, on Septembers, 1841.^ We note him, 
in passing, to have been the immediate contempo- 
rary of Thomas Hardy and of Austin Dobson in 
England, of Sully Prudhomme and of Heredia in 
France. The early life of Count Snoilsky was not 
distinguished from those of most young noblemen 
of fortune who are destined from childhood for 
the service of the State. He began, however, quite 
soon to rhyme, and at the age of twenty produced 
a volume of Short Poems," under the pseudonym, 
which he long preserved, of Sven Trost. This 
collection is sentimental and melancholy ; we see 
in it the influence of current Swedish verse and 
some imitation of Heine. 

When, however, Sven Trost had recovered from 
the infantile malady of sentiment which the publica- 
tion of his first volume brought to a crisis, he rapidly 
developed in an independent direction. The lyrical 
work of that period in Sweden was concentrated in a 
company of friends, lovers of romantic false names, 
who were known as the Signatures. Among them 
Sven Trost had taken his place, and he continued to 
contribute to their annuals and anthologies, without 

* Karl Warburg, perhaps the first of contemporary Swedish 
critics, has published an admirable biography, " Carl Snoilsky, 
bans lefnad och skaldskap." (Hugo Gebers Forlag, 
Stockholm.) 
232 



CARL SNOILSKY 

recognising how completely he was breaking away 
from them in spirit. In 1862 he seems to have per- 
ceived, by the light of nature, the insipidity and 
flatness of the idealism " then prevalent in Swedish 
literature, and to have determined to practise, if he 
did not preach, what he called "a healthy artistic 
realism." His second book, Orchids," was a collec- 
tion of fifty poems instinct with sunlight and joy, 
flushed with the beauty of youthful exuberance. 
Denmark was at this time far more richly endowed 
with lyrical writers than Sweden, and it was 
Snoilsky's good fortune to come under the influence 
of those enchanting Danish song- writers of an earlier 
school, Christian Winther and Bodtcher. This 
little book showed great advance. 

In 1864 Snoilsky went to Italy for a residence of 
many months, and so completed his poetical educa- 
tion. He enjoyed a delicate robustness of health, a 
conscious glow of youth, and he seems to have 
cultivated at this time, with remarkable success, the 
cordial epicureanism which so peculiarly suits the 
Swedish nation. It took in him that pleasing tone 
of seriousness, of tender sobriety, which robs the 
pursuit of pleasure of all its coarseness. At this, the 
moment of his highest emotional and imaginative 
development, we see Carl Snoilsky a sensitive creature 
of quite irresistible charm, aglow in Nero's Golden 
House at Rome, brooding in an elegant melancholy 
under the cypresses at Fiesole, leading the revels at 
Nemi with cups of Alban wine, or bewitching the 
rugged Ibsen in his little smoky osteria of the Via 

233 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

Tritone. All this time Snoilsky was living and 
writing poems, such poems as had not been sung 
before, at least in recent times, under the pallid 
aurora of a Swedish sky. No translation can do 
justice to the qualities of the verse which Snoilsky 
composed during this ineffable pilgrimage of youth. 

If there be a touch of weakness in the volume of 
Poems," of 1869, by which Snoilsky first became 
widely revealed to the public, it consists in a perhaps 
too dainty or comely conception of art, an unwilling- 
ness, even while coming closely into touch with the 
reality of nature, to accept anything which is sordid 
or ugly. Throughout Europe in that generation the 
best of the poets were infatuated devotees of beauty, 
and they prepared the way for an inevitable reaction 
in favour of ugliness. But the note of joy, of physical 
ecstasy, in the dancing verse of Snoilsky was like 
witchcraft. It intoxicated his readers, accustomed 
to the staid melancholy and affected undertone of 
his fellow-singers. He stood out in the colourless 
current literature of his country like a piece of scarlet. 
The opening stanzas of the book of 1869 struck the 
note which never wavered : 

I bring grapes, I bring roses, I pour out beakers 
of my young wine. Up every pathway, at every 
cross-road, I smite my resonant tambourine. 

" I do not weary you out of all your patience with 
insipid visions from the house of dreams. I sing 
exclusively of what I have seen and felt by the aid of 
my own five wholesome senses." 

And all this in a metre that swings and dances, 
^34 



CARL SNOILSKY 

with its ripple of rhymes, like a breeze in the top of 
a pine-tree, 

Snoilsky returned to Sweden, to be sent away 
again as charge d'affaires to Copenhagen, where 
he formed a close friendship with the first 
of recent critics, Georg Brandes. The present 
writer, who was in Denmark soon after this 
date, recalls how enthusiastically Brandes spoke 
of Snoilsky, and how ardent were his hopes for a 
complete rejuvenescence of the poetic literature of 
the North in the person of the brilliant young 
diplomat. However, a series of unlucky personal 
relationships seems about this time to have interfered 
with the free development of Snoilsky's genius. He 
had married in 1867, but not happily, and his family 
vexed him with a persistent complaint that he ought 
not to publish verses, as this was an act unbe- 
coming in a nobleman." Such a pretension can 
excite nothing but laughter, yet was an indica- 
tion of the absolute absence of sympathy which 
gradually drained the happiness out of a life made 
for amenity and joy. His early career as a poet 
closed with a volume of Sonnets " in 1871, after 
which it was understood that he consented to bow to 
the anti-poetical prejudices of his family. These 
sonnets are acknowledged to be the finest hitherto 
published in Swedish. 

Snoilsky's withdrawal from the poetic art was, 
however, even now, rather relative than positive. He 
was engaged on a translation of the Shorter Poems 
of Goethe ; and original compositions of his own 

235 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



appeared, although rarely, and with manifest signs of 
a cessation of the old fire and enthusiasm. He was 
unhappy, dissatisfied, and life no longer offered him 
its grapes and its roses. In the spring of 1879 
Sweden was thrilled by the news that Count Carl 
Snoilsky had left Stockholm, throwing up all his 
appointments and engagements, and that he was 
accompanied in his flight to Italy by one of the 
leaders of aristocratic Swedish society, the Countess 
Ebba Piper. For a long time they were lost to the 
circle of their friends ''more than if they had been 
dead." But in 1880, the way having been made 
clear for them, the intrepid lovers were married at 
Marseilles, and the oppression of the last ten years 
seemed to be removed from the poet's inspiration. 
Snoilsky entered on his second poetic period. His 
wife and he went over to Africa, and spent many 
months in a slow pilgrimage through Algeria and 
Tunis, returning to Italy and ultimately settling in 
Florence. In 1881 his '' New Poems " revealed to 
Swedish readers what may almost be called a new 
poet, no longer a fiery, spontaneous, and dionysiac 
improvisatore, perhaps, but a bard completely master 
of a grave, sonorous instrument. Snoilsky wrote in 
a private letter at this time : '' The art of poetry 
has hitherto been a game to me. Now I am 
more and more penetrated by a sense of its deep 
seriousness and significance, and by a conviction 
that it is the real business of my life." 

Engaged in literary work, Snoilsky remained 
abroad, chiefly in Dresden, until 1885, when, after 
236 



CARL SNOILSKY 

a visit to Finland, he was persuaded to return for a 
few weeks' visit to Stockholm. The warmth of the 
reception which he received startled and touched 
him. The students arranged a festival in his 
honour; the King — Oscar II., himself a poet of 
renown — was graciousness incarnate. But Snoilsky 
could not be prevailed upon to stay ; Dresden, he 
declared, had become his home. However, the 
fascination of the Fatherland became more and 
more overpowering, and few years now passed in 
the course of which the Snoilskys did not visit 
Sweden. In the autumn of 1890 his Byronic exile 
of nearly twelve years came formally to an end, 
when the poet accepted the post of Chief Librarian 
in the Royal Library of Stockholm. He wrote but 
little, and but little of that in verse, after his return 
to settle in his native land. The remainder of his 
life, spent in the serene and regular performance 
of his duties, and surrounded by the affection of his 
friends, was uneventful. His health gave way, and 
he was removed to a nursing home, where he died 
on May 19, 1903. 

Although Snoilsky lived far into the revival of 
Swedish literature, it cannot be said that he showed 
much comprehension of its aims or sympathy with 
its movement. That, perhaps, was more than could 
be expected from a man of his character and ante- 
cedents. His own style had been definitely formed 
in the sixties, and there was much in the intel- 
lectual revolution of the eighties which could not 
but be distasteful to him. With all the beautiful 

237 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



qualities of his art, Snoilsky was deeply impregnated 
with the epicureanism which was typical of culti- 
vated thought in Sweden during his youth, and he 
was not inclined to embrace the violent and sinister 
innovations of Strindberg and his followers. About 
1880, outside his own practice, the vogue of verse 
in Sweden rapidly declined ; the darkest hour lasted 
from 1885 to 1890, when Swedish poetry was 
nearer total extinction than it had been for a couple 
of centuries. The new poetry, which came into being 
about the year 1891, was manifested, almost simul- 
taneously, in the works of three very great lyrical 
artists, in whose hands Swedish verse once more 
rose to its proper eminence. These three poets 
were Froding, Levertin, and Heidenstam. It is 
worthy of notice that the exhibition of this new 
energy in Swedish poetry was almost exactly 
coincident with the return of Snoilsky from exile to 
take up his official duties at Stockholm. 

Few writers defy translation into a foreign 
language more completely than Gustaf Froding 
who combines with a conscious study of the 
methods of the Northern folk-song a spontaneous 
lyrical elaboration of language and a buoyancy of 
metre which make his poems as difficult as they are 
fascinating. Froding, who was born in i860, died 
on February 8, 191 1 ; for ten years he was in the 
retirement of a hospital at Upsala. His briUiant 
and meteoric career was practically confined within 
the brief years from 1890 to 1898. Guitar and 
Harmonica," " Flashes and Patches," and equally 
238 



CARL SNOILSKY 

eccentric titles to Froding's successive volumes of 
verse, indicate the irregularity of his taste, in which 
something of Burns is combined with more than a 
touch of Baudelaire, and with a wildness, some- 
times very ghastly and sinister, which is wholly his 
own. But he is perhaps the most interesting purely 
lyrical writer of modern Sweden. 

In Oscar Levertin there was less phosphores- 
cence and more witchery ; he was not such an 
improvisatore as Eroding, but a finer craftsman. 
He was a Jew of Frisian extraction, born in 
Ostergotland in 1862. He had attained great 
eminence as a prose-writer, particularly in historical 
criticism, before his superb talent as a poet was 
revealed in 1891 by the publication of his Legends 
and Songs." This volume, which he wrote at Davos 
while waiting for what he believed would be a 
hopeless struggle with consumption, produced a 
great sensation in Sweden. It has been said that 
the new epoch in Swedish poetry dates from the 
appearance of that volume. Levertin's use of 
language is magical, and his lyrics give a poignant 
expression to those feelings of frustrated passion 
and disillusioned longing which are so charac- 
teristic of the latest generation of Northerners* 
Levertin died in Stockholm in 1906. 

Verner von Heidenstam, who was born in 1859,. 
w^as the author of early poems of great beauty and 
originality, but he has now become principally 
known as a prose-writer whose monumental simpli- 
city and classic beauty of style leave him without a 

239 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



rival among his contemporaries. Per Hallstrom^ 
born in 1866, was one of those who were started on 
their poetical career by the revival of 1891 ; but he 
has written very little verse. He is known as a 
novelist of singularly penetrative fancy, and as a 
master of detail in observation. The production of 
poetry, as we understand it, is not very abundant in 
Sweden to-day. The word diktare, like dichter in 
German, does not mean poet in our English sense, a 
writer in verse, but an imaginative author generally. 
A novelist is call a diktare. But the Swedish 
language has a word, skald, which seems to answer 
precisely to the English word poet. It is needful to 
remember this in dealing with Swedish literature, 
or offence may be given by denying the title of poet 
to very distinguished masters of prose. 

The new literature of Sweden is largely naturalistic, 
but in the new poetry of Sweden there is more than 
a trace of mysticism, which gives a strange perfume 
to the realism of such austere writers as Strindberg 
and Hallstrom, as well as to the more romantic 
idealism of Verner von Heidenstam and Selma 
Lagerlof. But, whatever their individual tendencies, 
these new writers, whether in prose or verse, 
distinguish themselves by the vigour and the 
novelty which they have reintroduced into the 
somewhat exhausted literature of their country ; 
and in this admirable labour it is manifest that 
Snoilsky was the direct pioneer of them all. 

1911. 



240 



EUGENE MELCHIOR DE 
VOGUE 

1848-I9IO 



Q 



EUGENE MELCHIOR DE 



VOGUE 

In these days, when competent Hterary work is 
carried out punctually and monotonously by a large 
body of more or less professional writers, something 
more than the technical excellence of what is written 
is needed to arrest our attention to the man who 
writes. The author must offer some salient charac- 
teristic, some definite mental colour or spiritual 
form, if he is to be disengaged from the mob of 
gentlemen who sweep carefully and briskly over a 
wide variety of subjects. There must be a concin- 
nity ; the parts of a man's talent, character, history, 
idiosyncrasy must be so fitted together as to present 
a harmonious and definite effect. In such a con- 
cinnity the work and person of the late Vicomte de 
Vogiie do present themselves. On the crowded 
literary stage somebody always made an appearance 
when it was he who entered ; a blank is manifest 
now that he so suddenly and untimely quits it for 
ever. In the few words that follow, written before 
the leaders of critical opinion in France have had 
ime to sum up his qualities, an effort will be made 

243 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



to say how that dignified and austere figure struck 
an English contemporary. 

There was Httle in the person of Melchior de 
Vogiie to attract the idle curiosity of the crowd, and 
in consequence he was never one of the notabilities 
, of the boulevard. He was independent, austere, 
rather cold in manner, aloof from the crowd. He 
offered no affectation for the journalist, no eccen- 
tricity for the caricaturist. There was that in his 
outer presence which transmitted feeling with diffi- 
culty. Full of honte as he was, he could not give an 
impression of bonhomie. He was timid, reserved, and 
conscious of his moral and intellectual superiority ; 
the unreasoning quality in his fellow-men never 
ceased to distress and alarm him. He was the head 
of the younger branch of an ancient family, which 
had, in times past, scarcely distinguished itself by 
anything except its pride ; Torgueil des Vogues " 
had always been a proverb. In the eminent writer 
who has now left us the family characteristic took 
the form of a dignified withdrawal from controversy. 
He would not strive nor cry, but his tall, stiff figure, 
his careful dress, his limpid, penetrating eyes, his 
hard voice with the odd break in it, all combined 
to testify to the imperious, dictatorial, and self- 
concentrated nature which good breeding and 
good taste held in a perpetual outward control. He 
gave a sustained impression of suavity and serenit3^ 
The ideal of Melchior de Vogiie was one of pure, 
unimpassioned intellectuality. His central ambition 
was to rule by sheer mental predominance. He was 
244 



EUGENE MELCHIOR DE VOGUE 



not indifferent to the passions of the hour, but he 
preferred not to be drawn into their vortex. He 
was not insensitive to the sorrows of the world, but 
he was thoroughly determined to stand outside all 
the coteries which battled about them in the public 
arena. He meant to help, but it must be by means 
of a long arm from outside. 

This is the external view of the grave and punc- 
tilious aristocrat who occupied so large a place in the 
literary life of his time, and with whom, however, 
even in Paris, nobody was ever known to take a 
liberty. The internal view will, doubtless, be 
presently expressed by numerous and ardent friends. 
Vogiie was a stoic, but beneath his moral austerity 
there glowed a humanity none the less attractive 
because it was veiled by reserve. This cold, stiff 
man, who rarely smiled, who moved upon his 
appointed way as though his head were in the 
clouds, possessed an inward serenity which was 
founded, not on egotism, but on tenderness of 
aspiration. His peculiar earnestness and power 
were intensified by that content, 

surpassing wealth. 

The sage in meditation founds 

And walked with inward glory crowned. 

The subject of his meditation was the redemption of 
the spirit of man. He found that spirit walking in 
a dry place, and he pondered long on a mode of 
leading it back into the oasis of dreams. He was 
faithful in hope ; sad, but never discouraged ; it 

245 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



seemed better to do nothing than to do what was 
hasty or commonplace. At length his patience left 
him. He found that the soul was being stifled in 
the French culture of his day, and he undertook its 
resuscitation. He tore away^ the cere-clothes of 
pseudo-scientific dogmatism, and he wrote (in his 
manifesto of 1885) : 

" A quoi bon vivre, si ce n'est pour s'instruire, 
c'est-a-dire pour modifier sans relache sa pensee ? 
Notre ame est le lieu d'une perpetuelle metamor- 
phose : c'est meme la plus sure garantie de son 
immortalite. Les deux ideas ne sont jamais separees 
dans les grands mythes ou la sagesse humaine a 
resume ses plus hautes intuitions." 

This was strange language in the Paris of a quarter 
of a century ago, although it may seem natural 
enough to-day. If it is natural to-day it is largely 
because Melchior de Vogiie condemned the Hterary 
Pharisaism which denied all modification and all 
intuition, and that jeered at the unseen and the 
unobserved. He is worthy of honour and attention 
because, in a dark hour, he stood out for loyalty, for 
religion, for hope and consolation. To him is due 
the reappearance of mystery and illusion in French 
imaginative literature. Weariness and emptiness had 
fallen upon the fields of literature, and it was Vogiie 
who called down once more upon them the dews of 
virtue and beauty. He has been called the Chateau- 
briand of the Third Republic, and the comparison is 
not without suggestiveness. 

Marie Eugene Melchior de Vogiie was born at 
246 



EUGENE MELCHIOR DE VOGUE 



Nice on February 24, 1848. Long afterwards, 
when he was admitted to the French Academy, 
it was whimsically remarked that, without close 
examination of the facts, no future historian would be 
able to decide whether he was born under a king or 
under a republic, in France or in Italy, a member of 
the nobility or a simple citizen. To these hesita- 
tions may be added another : whether his birthplace 
was really Nice by the accident of a visit, or the 
ancestral castle of Gourdan, where all his early life 
was to be passed. Gourdan, the home of the cadet 
branch of the Vogiie family, stands, deep in woods, 
near the summit of the Coiron, a chain of the 
Cevennes, in the wildest part of the wildest province 
of France, the Ardeche. Immediately around it 
the volcanic basalt takes shapes of grotesque and 
sinister violence, which filled the imagination of 
the child with wonder. From his mother, a very 
beautiful Englishwoman, who survived until 1910, 
Melchior obtained his earliest impressions of an 
exotic language and literature. He has described 
how, at a very tender age, he fell under the charm 
of the vast and deserted library at Gourdlan, fitted 
out in the eighteenth century with everything proper 
for the boredom of a nobleman. 

It was to another source, however, as he has told 
us in one of his rare moments of self-revelation, 
that he owed the bias of his life. He was taken, as 
a child, to see the curiosities of his own immediate 
neighbourhood, and these included, in that noble 
valley of the Rhone, the amphitheatres, aqueducts, 

247 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



triumphal arches, and ruined mausoleums of Roman 
Gaul. It was at Orange, or Nimes, or Cavaillon 
that he felt " les premieres secousses de Tame," the 
earliest sensations of the majesty of the great 
dead past : 

" Depuis lors " (he continues), " les hasards d'une 
existence errante ont fait relever les visions pareilles 
sous mes pas, au Colisee, a I'Acropole, dans les 
ruines d'Ephese et de Baalbeck, sous les pylones de 
Louqsor et sous les coupoles de Samarcande ; j'ai 
admire partout, mais je n'ai retrouve nulle part 
I'ivresse toute neuve, I'eblouissement laisse dans mes 
yeux par les reliques de Provence, par les blocs 
romains tremblants a midi dans la vapeur d'or, sur 
le pale horizon d'oliviers d'ou monte la plainte 
ardente des cigales." 

Early he formed the design of becoming a 
traveller. It may strike us as strange that one who 
was to be the typically academic writer of his 
generation seems to have had no more regular 
education than could be given him, in a brief 
passage, by the Fathers of Notre Dame at Auteuil. 
At the age of twenty Melchior left *^son chateau 
farouche " in the Ardeche and started wandering in 
Italy. There the war of 1870 found him. He 
rushed back to France and, in company with an 
elder brother, who was already commencing soldier 
at St. Cyr, volunteered for the front. He fought at 
Rethel, he was slightly wounded at Beaumont ; 
towards the close of the long and tragic day at 
Sedan his brother was shot dead at his side. 
248 



EUGENE MELCHIOR DE VOGUE 



Melchior escaped, to be captured by the Prussians 
and imprisoned for six months at Magdeburg. 

With his release his practical career began. His 
cousin, twenty years his senior, the Marquis de Vogiie 
— himself now a member of the French Academy — 
proceeded to Constantinople as Ambassador of the 
Republic, and Melchior, entering the diplomatic 
career, accompanied him as secretary. This was 
a period of awakening intellectual energy, the 
effects of which were manifest in all the young 
man's early writings, in the inevitable volume of 
poems, without which no prose-writer considers 
himself equipped (in Melchior de Vogue's case 
never, I think, published), in his impressions of 
Syria, of Palestine, of Egypt, which were enclosed 
in his charming *^ Voyages au pays du passe " of 
1876. It was at Constantinople that his soul was 
first roused to a clear perception of the eternal 
beauty of the past, and he spent, let us not say 
that he wasted, months and years listening to the 
waters of the Bosphorus as they broke in star- 
showers under the secular cypresses. 

In the winter of 1872 he visited Ephesus, Rhodes, 
Byblos, Baalbeck, Jerusalem, everywhere intent 
upon following, as though it were a strain of 
fugitive music, the perpetual tradition of the past, _ 
everywhere seeking among the ruins of antiquity 
for the perennial melody of Ufe. His earliest 
impressions are of a gravity which may almost 
make us smile, so little have they of the thoughtless 
buoyancy of youth. But the writer dreaded in 

249 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



himself as much as he detested in others the 
juvenile arrogance which breaks with bygone 
dignities. What he would have said to the Nathans 
and the Marinettis of to-day, the furious charlatans 
whose instinct before antique beauty is to shatter 
and defile, it is perhaps best that they should never 
know. The earliest essays of the Syria and Palestine 
series have the elegant naivete of unconscious art. 
They would not have been written but for the 
accident that a friend, Henri de Pontmartin, who 
was prevented from accompanying Vogiie, begged 
for a detailed record, and, having received it, 
would give the author no peace until he had per- 
suaded him to send his letters to the Revue des 
■ ':^'Deux Mondes. In the summer of 1875 Vogiie 
made a careful examination of Mount Athos, and 
the result of this was likewise welcomed by the 
Revue. 

From Cairo Melchior de Vogiie was promoted 
to St. Petersburg in 1876. At the first shock the 
contrast between the South and the North seemed 
to be too severe, but he speedily regained his 
^ balance of spirit, and the problems of Russian 
history made a passionate appeal to his curiosity. 
He taught himself the Russian language, in which 
he presently became a proficient, and he threw 
himself with vehemence into the study of a people 
which was just beginning to attract warm sympathy 
in France, but of whose literature, customs, and 
traditions the French were still almost entirely 
ignorant. In Russia Vogiie found much ready help 
250 



EUGENE MELCHIOR DE VOGUE 



and many suggestions. He buried himself in the 
vast history of Soloviov, who was still alive, and, 
unless I am misinformed, he found occasion to 
attend the lectures of that eminent professor at 
Moscow. He followed with keen attention the 
archaeographic and ethnographic discoveries of 
Kostmaroff, with whose enlightened and patriotic 
liberalism Vogiie was in full conformity. He was 
led on to study the Russian character as it is 
revealed by the great imaginative writers of the 
third quarter of last century, the giants who, at the 
time of his arrival in St. Petersburg, were, with the 
exception of Gogol, all still alive and at the height 
of their power. 

It was part of the remarkable talent of Melchior 
de Vogiie that he was always ready to accept a new 
view of life. He was keen to appreciate all forms 
of vital beauty, however foreign they might be to 
the traditions in which he himself had hitherto 
been brought up. His spirit was from its birth a 
wanderer, but it traversed the waste places of the 
world without a trace of the brand of Cain upon its 
brow. On the contrary, the shadow of the pale 
leaf of the olive was always flickering against it. 
Vogiie, taking himself, as he did, infinitely au 
serieux, very deeply interested in all the modifica- 
tions of human life, already dreaming of how he 
might restore serenity and faith to the outworn 
intellectuality of France, was for a moment daunted 
by the strangeness of Russia, and then violently, 
and finally, fell in love with its indulgence and 

251 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

simplicity. In certain admirable recent studies^ 
one of the best equipped of our younger critics 
has dwelt on the great difficulty presented by "the 
paradoxical thread which runs through the Russian 
character." Thirty-five years ago this element of 
paradox was unrecognised and undefined, even by 
the Russians themselves. It puzzled and baffled 
Vogii^, with his logical Latin instinct, his perfect 
reasonableness, his austere and authoritative temper 
of mind, but it rather fascinated than repelled him. 

What we have to deal with here, however, is not 
the genius of Russia in itself, but the effect of that 
genius on the mind of a Frenchman destined, 
through his assimilation of certain elements in 
it, to exercise a great influence on his own people. 
Whether Vogiie really comprehended Russia or not 
is a question which I am not competent to answer, 
and it lies aside from the present discussion. What 
is interesting at this moment is the fact that a 
young French writer, resident in St. Petersburg 
between 1875 and 1882, carefully cultivating a rich, 
full style which he restrained within the limits of 
an almost classic purity, employed that style, with 
all its gravity of reflection and profusion of imagery, 
on the interpretation of an alien literature which 
was remarkable for the opposites of all these 
qualities, for turbulence, redundancy, stubbornness, 
exaggerated emotion, and sensuous extravagance of 
fancy. The strange material on which he worked 

^ " Landmarks in Russian Literature," by Maurice Baring. 
(Methuen & Co., 1910.) 
252 



EUGENE MELCHIOR DE VOGUE 



not merely did not affect his method towards an 
imitation of itself, but the more intimately he studied 
it and extracted from it what was sympathetic to 
his temperament, the more were the eminently 
un-Russian qualities of Vogiie, his serried thought, 
the complication of his firm, ornate, rather old- 
fashioned style, his perfect probity and moderation 
of sentiment, emphasised in the careful progress of 
his writings. 

It was in the presence of Russia that his own 
peculiar character became developed, one would 
affirm, in a peculiarly un-Russian direction. That 
he was absorbed, in these early diplomatic days, in 
the social forms and habits of his adopted country 
did not prevent him from remaining exquisitely 
and rigidly French. He traversed the vast empire 
from north to south ; he followed the conquering 
army of General Annenkoff to Khiva and Samar- 
kand ; he even sealed his troth to Russia by 
marrying the general's sister, Anna Nicolaievna, 
who, with their four sons, survives him to-day. In 
spite of all this, and in spite of the very strong 
infusion of Russian sentiment into his character 
and his strong streak of English blood, Melchior 
de Vogiie remained intensely French, and the 
principal result of his study of Russia was that his 
familiarity with the semi-Oriental order of ideas 
gave him a weapon to use in his approching fight 
in the West against the enemies of spiritual and 
religious beauty. 

Vogue's regular communication of Russian studies 

253 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

-Vto the Revue des Deux Mondes, with which he was 
identified until the end of his Hfe, and from the 
office of which he may be said to have stepped into 
the French Academy, began in March 1879, upon 
the publication of his De Byzance a Moscou." 
This rather abstrusely treated episode in Russian 
literature of the sixteenth century must have struck 
Buloz by its intrinsic merits, for it was given the 
first place in the review. It is noticeable that 
Vogue, in describing the singular vision which 
appeared to the dying Czar Feodor in 1598, adopts 
the attitude towards the inexplicable, the mys- 
terious, which he was about to make characteristic 
of all his writing. From this time forwards for 
more than thirty years we may trace in the pages of 
the Revue des Deux Mondes, in which most of his 
books originally made their appearance, the deve- 
lopment of Melchior de Vogue's critical powers, 
and their gradual progression, through archaeology 
and history, to the analysis of pure literature and 
philosophical politics. 

In 1882 he quitted the diplomatic career and 
returned to Paris, to devote himself without reserve 
to the practice of literature. On October 15 
of the following year there appeared in the 
Revue des Deux Mondes the earliest of those 
studies of the Russian novel which, in their 
collected form, not only did more than anything 
else to make Melchior de Vogiie famous, but 
offered him an unanticipated opportunity for exer- 
cising a wide and salutary influence. It was about 
254 



EUGENE MELCHIOR DE VOGUE 



this time that he made the acquaintance of, or at 
least sealed his intimate friendship with, Taine, then 
at the zenith of his glory, and busily labouring at 
his colossal enterprise, the Origines de la France 
contemporaine." It would not be exact to say 
that Vogiie became the disciple of Taine, for his own 
genius was by this time too mature for that, but 
the probity and profundity of the elder writer made 
a deep impression of encouragement on the mind 
of the younger. Vogiie was attracted to Taine by 
a considerable similarity in their temperaments ; 
the younger man was by birthright what the elder 
had become under the stress of life, majestueuse- 
ment triste." They had a prodigious subject in 
common, the divagations of the human intelligence, 
its poverty and its weakness. Each had indulged, 
in the examination of life and history, an ardent 
curiosity ; each had been easily persuaded of the 
preponderance of suffering and of the futility of 
contending with it otherwise than by a severe and 
patient stoicism. 

Taine became to Vogiie a sort of living con- 
science. At the mere thought of any concession 
to the vulgarity of the crowd, the younger writer 
blushed beforehand at the silence of the elder. They 
exchanged impressions with regard to the foreign 
literatures which each of them loved more than did 
any other Frenchmen of their day ; and Vogiie read 
the shorter tales of Tourgeniev aloud to Taine 
when the latter lay on his death-bed (March 1893). 
The account of Taine which Vogiie gives in his 

255 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



*^Devant le Siecle" has more human emotion in 
it than perhaps any other page of his work. 

The native-born exile, returning to his fatherland, 
perceives alterations in thought and feeling more 
emphatically than those who have never stirred out 
of the environment of home. Melchior de Vogiie, 
coming back to Paris in 1882, was astonished to 
find the men of letters, his friends, comparatively 
oblivious of the strides which a positive utilitarian- 
ism had made during his absence. In the novel, 
in particular — that is to say, in the branch of 
literature which appeals most directly and most 
abundantly to the average emotional reader — the 
development of what was called " naturalism " 
had been extraordinary. Encouraged by the extreme 
favour with which the stories of the Goncourts and his 
own scientific and mechanical romances had been 
received by the public, Zola ventured on a policy 
of exclusion. He dared to close the doors of mercy 
on any novelist who presumed to admit into his 
work the least idealism, the least note of pity, the 
least concession to faith or conjecture. All must 
be founded on meticulous observation. The imagi- 
native writer must be simply an " implacable 
investigator eager to take the human machine to 
pieces in order to see how its mechanism works." 
This scientific theory Zola expounded in three 
volumes of criticism, Le Roman Experimental " 
(1880)/' Les Romanciers Naturalistes" (1881), and 
" Mes Haines" (1882). He bore down all opposi- 
tion by his vehement sincerity, and he was much 
256 



EUGENE MELCHIOR DE VOGUE 



aided by the fact that for some years past all the 
cleverest young writers had been tending in the 
same direction, while the opposition of science to 
religion had been rapidly gaining ground in 
France. These were the years when the name of 
God was being erased from the school-books of 
Republican children, and when ardent provincial 
mayors were renaming Rue de Notre Dame de 
Bon-Secours, Rue de Paul Bert, or Passage de 
I'Adoration des Mages, Avenue de la Gare. These 
were the years when no valid resistance to the 
presumptuous and exclusive domination of logic 
seemed forthcoming in all the realms of French 
intelligence. 

Vogiie, examining what had been published of late 
by the principal imaginative writers of France, pro- 
tested that the soul had been forgotten. Zola was 
crying out, in his harsh and sincere voice, that the 
novelist must teach nothing but the bitter know- 
ledge of life, the proud and unflinching lesson 
of reality. All pictures of society were to be 
painted without prejudice or sympathy, without 
comment, without effusion, in close agreement with 
what Edmond de Goncourt, in a famous phrase 
called le document humain, pris sur le vrai, sur le 
vif, sur le saignant." There was a great deal to be 
said in favour of this cult of naturalism, which, 
reasonably followed, was doing wonders in clearing 
away the humbug, the dead flowers and last night's 
rouge, from an outworn romanticism. There could 
never be a return to the old romantic egoism, to a 

R 257 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



series of pseudo-biographies of a generation of 
Renes and Obermanns. The supreme value of 
reality and the absolute necessity of observation 
were admitted beyond all denial. But in the course 
of his Russian studies Vogiie had discovered a school 
of realists who were no less serious and thorough 
than Zola, but who admitted far more spiritual 
unction into their attitude to life. In Dostoieffsky 
and Tolstoy he found great masters of fiction who 
appreciated the value of scientific truth, but who 
were not content to move a step in the pursuit of it 
without being attended by pity and hope. 

In 1883 Melchior de Vogiie began to print his 
series of studies of the Russian novel in the 
pages of the Revue. He treated Gogol, Tourgeniev, 
Dostoieffsky, and Tolstoy ; he traced the origins of 
the tree of which they were the consummate 
fruitage ; he showed how Pushkin, an enchanting 
poet, had made the ground ready for these giants in 
prose. The subject was not absolutely new, of 
course, to French readers ; it had been treated 
learnedly and amply by such excellent authorities as 
Leroy-Beaulieu and Rambaud. Some of the novelists 
themselves were already in the hands of Parisians, 
Gogol and the now semi- Parisian Tourgeniev in 
particular. But the two greatest of all were practi- 
cally unknown, and it was while Vogue's successive 
monographs were appearing in the Revue des Deux 
Mondes that Dostoieffsky and Tolstoy were for the 
first time competently rendered in French, and in 
this language circulated through the instructed 
258 



EUGENE MEL;CHI0R DE VOGUE 

world. AH over France there was running at that 
time an increasingly sympathetic curiosity concern- 
ing Russian thought and Russian manners. The 
articles of Vogiie gratified this thirst for knowledge, 
but it was not until they were reprinted in a volume 
that their full significance was appreciated. 

It was by " Le Roman Russe/' which appeared 
in the summer of 1886, that Melchior de Vogiie first 
became widely known, and the " Avant-Propos 
with which that volume was launched on the waters 
of controversy is of all his writings the one which 
has exercised the most lasting influence. This 
critical preface to a contribution to criticism has the 
extraordinary value of a manifesto, put forth with 
equal passion and adroitness at the precise moment 
when the reading world was ready to accept it. 
Every circumstance connected with its pubHcation 
was happy. The articles on Russian literature, 
spread over three years, had greatly increased the 
prestige of the writer ; their success had led to the 
introduction to French readers of the principal 
Russian works described ; those works had been 
read, were now being more eagerly than ever read, 
still with some bewilderment at their strangeness ; 
meanwhile the naturalistic theory of fiction, pushed 
to extremities by Zola and his disciples, had begun 
to pall upon their admirers. France was ready for 
a new voice, a fresh wind of the spirit ; every one 
was prepared to welcome a man daring enough to 
proclaim that we had had enough of these dry 
bundles of observations, this mechanical pursuit of 

259 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

purposeless phenomena : Our living and mys- 
terious flower, the genius of France, cannot be 
plucked by botanists who merely catalogue dead 
species in their hortus siccus," 

The remarkable effect caused by the publication 
of Le Roman Russe " — perhaps the most epoch- 
making single volume of criticism issued in France 
during our time — was due to the unusual literary 
conditions acted on by the daring and the sagacity 
of a wise and fearless writer. The Naturalists had 
pushed too far their formula that we can know 
nothing but what we can see,and that the inexplicable 
is the non-existent. From the dry positivism of this 
law there seemed to be no appeal until Vogiie, who 
had studied the Russians so closely, claimed to have 
learned from them, if he had learned nothing else, 
that there could be no more barren error than to 
limit our affirmations by our exact and measured 
experiences. He considered the theory of man- 
kind as the Goncourts and Zola conceived it, and 
he was courageous enough to declare it hopelessly 
incomplete. Beyond it, stretching away in infinite 
chequer of radiance and shadow, he pointed to the 
domains of dreamland, untracked, unsuspected 
by the authors of " Cherie " and " La Terre." 

The original object of Vogiie in writing his 
studies of the Russian novelists had been to draw 
the two countries closer together by the inter- 
penetration of the things of the spirit. He had 
worked in certain definite zones of thought, whence 
he had chosen typical individuals ; he practically 
260 



EUGENE MELCHIOR DE VOGUE 



confined himself to the four greatest masters of 
Russian fiction. He treated each of these in the best 
biographical temper, the man illustrating the work, 
and both seen in relation to society. In the course of 
this inquiry certain features of Russian imagination 
had strongly impressed themselves upon him. Mr. 
Maurice Baring has recently defined for us the 
elements of the realism of the Russians, their 
closeness to nature, their gift of seeing things as 
they are, and of expressing those things in terms 
of the utmost simplicity." He proceeds to say 
that this is the natural expression of the Russian 
temperament and the Russian character." This 
realism Vogiie compared with the formal and 
mechanical realism of the French Naturalists, and 
it opened his eyes to the fallacies of the latter. He 
saw that the aptitudes of Tolstoy and Dostoieffsky 
included a moral inspiration which alone could 
excuse the harshness of the realistic method. 

It had become the principle of literature in Paris 
about 1885 to ignore the mystery which exists about 
us, to repudiate the tiny parcel of divinity which 
every human being contains. Vogue's answer to 
Zola's challenge was that we must, indeed, affirm 
nothing dogmatically with regard to the unknown 
world, but that we should so far let ourselves go 
as to be for ever trembling on the brink of it. 
Realism, he pointed out, became odious at the 
moment when the development of its dogma in- 
sisted on the exclusion from its work of the element 
of charity. Literature, instead of acting as a stony- 

261 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



hearted contemplator of wretchedness, should make 
(5 J suffering supportable by an endless flow of pity. 
Vogue spoke out, loud and bold, against the men 
of letters who denied that literature should, in any 
3>case, have a moral purpose, and who covered with 
scorn the novelist that endeavoured to console and 
fortify humanity. Which of you, he said in effect, 
will dare to contemn Dostoieffsky, under whose 
gigantic shadow you all shrink to a puny stature ? 
When Edmond de Goncourt talked about the im- 
mutable laws of beauty which demanded the 
experimental treatment, Vogiie replied that the 
eminent connoisseur was confusing a material 
thing, the technical beauty of execution, with a 
divine and spiritual grace. The great word came 
out at last, and the critic burned his ships — *^the 
1 religious sentiment is, after all, indispensable." 

When this had been said, there could be no 
length of daring to which the critic would not be 
expected to attain. He ventured to speak with 
severity of the high priest of Naturalism, of the 
mighty Stendhal himself. He did not scruple to 
accuse " La Chartreuse de Parme " of abominable 
dryness, nor to stigmatise " Rouge et Noir " as 
disastrous and hateful. What he disliked in these 
illustrious romances, and in the less weighty 
examples of their posthumous children, was the 
coldness and emptiness of their attitude to life. 
On the other hand, in some English novelists, and 
in particular in George Eliot, he found exactly what 
he wanted — realism, but realism expanded by 
262 



EUGENE MELCHIOR DE VOGUE 



tenderness. Vogue's tribute to Adam Bede " is 
the most beautiful which George Eliot ever re- 
ceived : Une larme tombe sur le livre ; pourquoi 
je defie le plus subtil de dire ; c'est que c'est beau 
comme si Dieu parlait, voila tout." 

Such is the temper of Le Roman Russe." 
Melchior de Vogue's attitude to religion in this mani- 
festO; and throughout the remainder of his works, 
was somewhat difficult to define, since he never 
defined it himself. He said that life only begins 
where we cease to understand it, and he strongly 
reproved the positive arrogance which denies the 
existence of the unseen and the unconfirmed. He 
was stout in defence of the essential value of faith, 
and he objected to an excessive dependence on 
what is concrete and logical. Yet he never pushed 
his tenderness of soul to the point of mysticism. 

The manifesto of 1886 had a remarkable effect. 
From all sides supporters came forward, souls 
who had wandered in darkness under the night of 
Naturalism. Vogiie found himself persecuted by 
would-be disciples, worried to lead down into the 
hurly-burly a self-styled body of " Neo-Christians." 
This was the absurd aspect of his influence ; what 
alone he himself valued was the part he had been 
enabled to take in the revival of idealistic literature 
in France. He told his too ardent imitators, when 
they came to him for a creed : You must choose 
your own mystery — the great thing is to have one." 
He probably hoped to see a definite reaction pre- 
sently set in, not merely in literature, but in politics 

263 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

and manners, a return to classicism pure and simple, 
the undiluted ancien regime; but the democracy 
has grown too multiform and comprehensive for 
that. 

During the quarter of a century which had suc- 
ceeded his famous Avant-Propos " the Vicomte 
de Vogiie lived a strenuous and uneventful life. 
In 1889 he was admitted into the French Academy ; 
from 1893 to 1898 he sat in the Palais Bourbon as 
member for Annonay, the largest town, though not 
the capital, of his own department of the Ardeche. 
He travelled much ; he made stately appearances 
in society ; otherwise his whole career was con- 
centrated in literature. He was a poor and proud 
aristocrat who made the writing of articles his 
profession. None of his books repeated the sensa- 
tional success of Le Roman Russe," but for all of 
them there was a loyal and respectful audience. 
In the midst of the frenzied entente of 1893 he 
pubhshed " Coeurs Russes," in which were the tales 
of Uncle Fedia, the colporteur, who gave his in- 
nocent life to save Akoulina ; of Vassili Ivanovitch, 
the tyrant landlord who came to life again while 
the serfs were dancing round his death-bed ; of 
Joseph Olenine and his magical robe of fur. He 
wrote novels, of which the best is ^' Jean d'Agreve," 
which has had passionate admirers, and which 
describes the life of a modern Tristram and Iseult 
in an elysian island somewhere off Hyeres. 
This is marvellously written, but too lyrical to 
be quite successful as a novel ; it is like what 
264 



EUGENE MELCHIOR DE VOGOE 



Epipsychidion " might have been if Shelley had 
written it in prose. One is surprised, on looking 
back, to see how many volumes the punctual and 
solid articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes contrived 
to fill as the years went uniformly by. 

The Vicomte Melchior de Vogiie was a very 
brilliant writer, but he was even more remarkable 
as a man. He will be remembered because, when 
weariness had fallen upon the world of letters, he 
discovered an oasis with a magical fountain in it. 
He tasted very sparingly of that well of waters him- 
self. He was austere, superficially dry, painfully 
haunted by the instability of things, chilled by the 
precarious and fragile tenor of all earthly hopes.j 
But he was an idealist of the purest temper, and 
his loyalty, clairvoyance, and a certain majesty of 
mind were infinitely precious qualities in an age 
so chaotic as that in which we live. 

1910. 



265 



1 



ANDRE GIDE 



ANDRE GIDE 

International taste in literary matters is apt to 
be very capricious. France, well informed about 
Stevenson and Mr. Kipling, full of curiosity regard- 
ing Swinburne and Mr. Hardy, could not, to the 
day of his death, focus her vision upon the figure 
of George Meredith. These are classic names, but, 
among those who are still competitors for immor- 
tality, mere accident seems to rule their exotic 
reputation. The subject of the following reflections 
is an example of this caprice. He was born forty 
years ago ; his life has been, it appears, devoted to 
the art of writing, of which he has come to be 
looked upon in France as a master. In Germany, 
in Italy, he has a wide vogue, especially in the 
former. By a confined, but influential, circle of 
readers he is already looked upon as the most 
interesting man of letters under the age of fifty. 
But, so far as 1 have noticed, his name is almost 
unknown in England. This is the more extra- 
ordinary because, as I hope to suggest, his mind 
is more closely attuned to English ideas, or what 
once were English ideas, than that of any other 
living writer of France. He has reproved (in 
Lettres a Angele " and elsewhere) the " detestable 

269 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



infatuation " of those who hold that nothing speaks 
intelligibly to the French mind, nor can truly sound 
well in a French ear, except that which has a French 
origin. M. Gide has shown himself singularly 
attentive to those melodies of the spirit which have 
an English origin, but his own music seems as yet 
to have found no echo here. 

Of the career of M. Gide little has been stated, 
since he is not one of those who talk freely about 
themselves in their books. But I take him to be a 
Southerner by extraction, born, or at least bred, in 
Normandy ; an Albigense transplanted, with all his 
hereditary Protestantism, from Languedoc to the 
shores of the Channel. He says, somewhere, that 
the Oc and Oil are equally familiar to his ear, and 
that he is not more devoted to the blossom of the 
apple than to that of the pomegranate. He has 
been, too, it is evident, a great wanderer over the face 
of Europe and Africa (" Amyntas and he affects, 
with an easy grace, some of the airs of the cosmo- 
politan. But in his heart I think that M. Gide is 
faithful to the Norman orchards. He is a product 
of Calvinism, and the extraordinary interest which 
the movements of his mind present is due to the 
concinnity they reveal in his moral basis. He 
offers himself to us, rather shyly, but very per- 
sistently, as a French Protestant who has grown up 
and out, oh ! so far and so pathetically outy of the firm 
low root based upon the Institution Chretienne." 
As a rule, the products of French Protestantism 
have not much general value for an English reader. 
.270 



ANDRE GIDE 

Our race has gone so much further in that direction, 
and with so much more variety ! The sacrifice of 
Calvinism to the national unity of the French has 
tended to dwarf the intellectual manifestations of 
the sect. But in the writings of M. Gide it is, I 
think, not too fantastic to discover what the import- 
ance of a Huguenot training can be in the develop- 
ment of a mind which has wholly delivered itself 
from the Huguenot bondage. 

The progress of M. Gide has been slow. He 
attempted many things : sentimental autobiography, 
something after the fashion of Mr. A. C. Benson ; 
poems in which he followed Laforgue and floated 
on the stream of symbolism ; miscellaneous and 
extravagant tentatives, which were half prose, half 
poetry. Gradually he gained confidence. In 1899 
his fantastic dream of a Prometheus in the Paris of 
our day was scornfully contested by the critics of 
the moment. In his curious dramas, ^' Saiil " and 

Le Roi Candaule," he felt his way towards a 
more and more personal mode of expression. He 
found it in his first serious novel, L'Immoraliste," 
in his essays (" Feuilles de route," Pretextes in 
his criticism. He has become what an early admirer 
prophesied that he would become, ^'a luminous 
Levite," one who with instant daily service tends the 
altar of intelligence and grace. He has gradually 
detached the singular originality of his temper from 
those accidents of style that enwrap, as silk enwraps 
a chrysalis, the formal parts of a new and ardent 
writer. 

271 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

Among the early writings of M. Andre Gide, there 
is one which, to my mind, stands out prominent 
above the rest. It is as difficult to describe the 
element which makes Paludes " (1895) one of the 
most exquisite of modern books as it would be to 
analyse the charm of Tristram Shandy." People 
are fond of repeating that the French have no 
humour, but Paludes " is humorous from end to 
end. It is not exactly a novel ; it is rather a satire 
on the excess of introspection which leads clever 
young men to write novels when they have nothing 
of the least moment to communicate. It is the story 
of a person who had a false conception of life, who 
raised about him a whirlwind of painful agitation 
because he did not realise that but one thing is 
needful. The unnamed author searches for a 
subject, and hits heavily upon the notion of a 
Virgilian shepherd, a solitary Tityrus, who shall 
inhabit a tower in the midst of a marsh, a palus^ 
and who shall cultivate his imagination there on 
the absence of every interest and object, in a vain 
search after originality. He starts upon his task, 
but the story — and no wonder — progresses at a 
snail's pace, interrupted by psychological digres- 
sions, checked by the depressing criticism of 
friends, and finally losing itself in a general vague- 
ness and sterile melancholy. The solemn folly of 
the novelist is contrasted with the bustle, the in- 
sufficiency, the frivolity of the chattering com- 
panions who surround him, and there is not less 
satire of middle-class mental emptiness in these 
272 



ANDRE GIDE 

latter than of the pompous excess of intellectual 
pretension in the artist himself, tortured by his 
own self-consciousness. What makes Paludes " 
extremely amusing to the consecutive student of 
M. Gide's work is that it marks a sort of crisis of 
good spirits, in which the youthful author turns 
suddenly upon himself with a burst of elfin laughter, 
and sweeps away the cobwebs of his own ingenuity. 
But the actual tissue of the book, with its swift 
alternations of beauty and fun, of malice and au- 
dacity, cannot be unravelled in a critical survey. 
*^ Paludes " lends itself, quite simply, to the pure 
enjoyment of the reader. 

It is, however, in a novel of sober fullness and 
distinguished originality that M. Gide has now 
definitely risen above the level of what is merely 
ingenious, or fantastic, or suggestive. In *^ La 
Porte Etroite " (1910) he has written one of the 
most beautiful books which have been printed in 
Europe for a long time. It is, therefore, as the 
author of that noble story that I propose to dwell 
at some considerable length. 

The scene of La Porte Etroite " is laid in the 
neighbourhood of Havre, where there exists, and 
has always existed, a numerous Huguenot con- 
gregation. The hero of the story, who tells the 
tale, is the only child of an austere and melancholy, 
but passive widow ; she and he share the company 
of a gentle English maiden lady, Miss Flora Ash- 
burton, whose sunken fortunes have led her grate- 
fully to accept this asylum. Between these pious 

s 273 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



gentlewomen Jerome gradually develops from 
infancy to boyhood in a sheltered air. His only 
diversion is an occasional visit to his cousins, the 
Bucolins, who inhabit a large house, set in a great 
tumultuous garden, close by at Fougueusemare. 
The Bucolins are Protestants also, and worship at 
the Havre temple," but their religion is not so 
sombre as that of Jerome's household, and in their 
life there are exceptional circumstances. Uncle 
Bucolin is an active man, engaged in business, and 
Aunt Bucolin is more exceptional still, for she is a 
Creole from Martinique, and she lies in bed half the 
day, and in a hammock the other half. The char- 
acter of Aunt Bucolin has always been felt to be 
hostile to the heavenly calling, and as the years go 
by she becomes more reckless. The Bucolins have 
three children, the eldest of whom, Alissa, is two years 
older than Jerome ; Juliette and Robert are younger. 

Jerome cannot recollect a time when a kind of 
vague and seraphic attraction has not projected 
itself on his juvenile spirit from the presence and 
voice of his cousm, Alissa. She has developed, and 
is still developing, a delicate virginal beauty, of the 
Tuscan order. To the boy's innocent pedantry her 
pale oval face, and eyebrows tenderly arched, recall 
the vision of Beatrice. There is, however, no 
realisation of the nature of this feeling on his part 
until, one day, a singular set of circumstances com- 
bine to give it voice. In the unsuspecting absences 
of Uncle Bucolin on business, in the innocence of 
her two younger children, the Creole aunt finds her 
274 



ANDRE GIDE 

opportunity to cultivate objectionable and dangerous 
acquaintances, and Jerome is present at a "scene" 
when the lady from Martinique is guilty of an odious 
want of decorum. He flies to the room of his 
cousin, Alissa, who alone is conscious of the horror 
which surrounds them all, and who greets him, 
turning as she kneels in supplication at her toilet- 
table, with an agonised cry, " Oh, Jerome, pourquoi 
reviens-tu ? " He cannot understand, or but very 
vaguely divines, what is the cause of Alissa's beautiful 
anguish, but he feels the celestial purity of her 
sorrow ; he interprets her cry as including him, 
adding his distress to the sum of humiliations ; and 
this is the turning-point of his life. For the future 
the boy will exist for no other purpose than to fill 
the soul of Alissa with happiness and peace. 

The terrible Creole woman presently cuts the 
knot herself by disappearing with one of her 
lovers, and the Bucolin family never hear of her any 
more. Gradually they settle down again into their 
customary mode of hfe, their pious attendance on 
the means of grace, their cheerful relations with 
others, their mutual devotion. The sinful branch 
has been cut off ; it has severed itself in a storm 
and been carried away in a night by the wind. At 
the chapel the incident is referred to, in the allusive 
manner customary among the devout, in the course 
of a powerful sermon on the text " Efforcez-vous 
d'entrer par la porte etroite ! " The wide gate which 
leadeth to destruction is picturesquely described, 
and Aunt Bucolin, without actually being men- 

275 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



tioned, is recalled to every mind as one of the 
noisiest of that over-dressed and loudly-laughing 
multitude which the preacher sees gaily descending 
to hell in the hideous exaggeration of sin. This 
remarkable discourse makes a profound impression 
upon Jerome. He imagines himself, against his will, 
elbowed by the sin-stricken crowd, and stunned by 
the noise of its laughter. Each step he takes divides 
him further and further from the melancholy eyes of 
Alissa. Suddenly the preacher makes a new and a 
direct appeal : Strive to enter in at the strait 
gate ! " and dilates on the pure, the ineffable joy 
which streams from a life of self-abnegation, a life 
all devoted to sacrifice and holy sorrow. He com- 
pares this state of grace, this strenuous " walk with 
God," with an air played in a lovely garden on a 
violin, an ecstasy at once strident and tender. 
" Few there be," he exclaims, who are chosen to 
pursue this life of sanctification." " I will be one 
of those few ! " says Jerome to himself. Looking 
across the pews of the chapel, he sees the pure 
countenance of Alissa all lighted up with the inward 
radiance, and he consciously unites, for the first time, 
the idea of her human love with that of the perfect 
love of Christ. He undergoes a double conversion ; 
he gives his soul without reserve to God and to Alissa. 

This conjunction of influences acts decisively on 
a spirit already prepared for it by the exercises of 
religion and by the puritan discipline of family life. 
As M. Gide very cleverly makes us feel, it is as 
natural for his hero to submit to moral restraints as 
276 



ANDRE GIDE 

it is for others to resist them. The instinctive habit 
of the circle in which Jerome had been brought up 
was to seek for happiness where others seek for 
pleasure, and to find pleasure only in the Lord's 
service. But in spite of this condition of mind and 
heart, the world, with all its many-coloured show, 
is rapidly expanding before the lad, and he begins 
to comprehend, as many a pious youth has com- 
prehended, that he cannot shelter his faith for ever 
behind the almost monastic hedges of private habit. 
In this crisis the love of Alissa seems to resemble 
the pearl of great price of which the Gospel speaks ; 
it is that for which Jerome will cheerfully and even 
thankfully sell all that he has. It is with a hand of 
extraordinary firmness and delicacy that the author 
has drawn the years of adolescence, in which the 
nature of Jerome widens and strengthens, without 
ever failing to keep the figure of Alissa before him 
like a star to guide him : 

^' Travail, efforts, actions pies, mystiquement 
j'offrais tout a Alissa, inventant un raffinement de 
vertu, a lui laisser souvent ignorer ce que je n'avais 
fait que pour elle. Je m'enivrais ainsi d'une sorte 
de modestie capiteuse et m'habituais, helas ! con- 
sultant peu ma plaisance, a ne me satisfaire a rien 
qui ne m'eut coute quelque effort." 

But the interest of the story now centres in Alissa, 
of whom we ask, as Jerome asks, what will be the 
development of her riper and perhaps intenser 
nature. Our first suspicion of a tragic destiny 
comes over us in the course of a scene, very lightly 

277 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



and even laughingly conducted, where Jerome 
involuntarily overhears a conversation in the garden 
between his cousin and her father. Jerome himself 
is the subject of their discussion, and his tendency 
to lean on the spiritual strength of others is anim- 
adverted upon. This leads to a talk between the 
cousins themselves, in which Alissa significantly 
asks him, ^^N'es-tu pas assez fort pour marcher 
seul ? C'est tout seul que chacun de nous doit 
gagner Dieu." She gently refuses to be his guide 
any longer : the soul can have no other guide but 
Christ. She winnows the vague grain of Jerome's 
convictions, and his pious sentimentality is blown 
away in chaff by the steady breeze of Alissa's clearer 
theology. Still, he can but worship God in and 
through her. That, she replies, h£ must not do, for 
pure worship sees nothing between the worshipper 
and God Himself. This is the first little rift within 
the lute of their perfect unison of hearts, and it 
marks the difference upon which their happiness is 
to be ultimately shattered. 

It would be to give a very false idea of this charm- 
ing book to dwell to excess on the religious problem 
which it raises. The story is one of domestic pro- 
vincial life in the north of France, among gentle 
and cultivated people, which is full of amusing 
studies of character, natural and entertaining inci- 
dents, and evidences of witty observation on the 
part of the author. But the real subject of the 
volume, the thread which runs through it and gives 
it intellectual adhesion, after all is precisely a 
278 



ANDRE GIDE 

searching analysis of the incompleteness and narrow- 
ness of the moral psychology of Protestantism. The 
author has seen how cruelly pietists suffer from 
excess of scruple, how disastrously they can be 
overwhelmed by the vain sentiment of sinfulness. 
He deals with a state of soul which is more compre- 
hensible in English society than in French, and which 
has, perhaps, found no exponent before in the litera- 
ture of France outside the ranks of those who have 
examined the results of a Jansenist training. 

The family councils, while admitting that the 
ultimate marriage of Jerome and Alissa is a matter of 
course, yet decide that a positive betrothal would be 
injudicious while Jerome is so young. To this post- 
ponement the wishes of Alissa also tend, although 
the only scruple which she yet acknowledges is the 
result of her slightly greater age, and the tendency, 
which he continues to show, to lean unduly on her 
judgment. The reader is made to perceive that 
her character is much more fully developed, and set 
on a much firmer basis, than that of her cousin. 
Jerome meanwhile proceeds into the world ; he 
studies for a profession in Paris ; he goes through 
his term of military service at Nancy ; he engages 
in a long journey through Italy. All these events, 
by a natural process of experience, enlarge his 
intelligence, explain to him the meaning of life, 
modify his judgments on mankind. His pure and 
devoted passion for Alissa, nevertheless, is subject 
to no real diminution, although absence and physical 
change obscure and sometimes make difficult the 

279 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



expression of it. Moreover, it is now almost entirely 
restricted to correspondence. 

While Jerome sees the world, however, in all its 
variegated lights and colours, Alissa roams in the 
shadow of the garden at Fougueusemare. She is 
wholly occupied in being a mother to her old father 
and to his family, in attending to her charities, and 
in practising her religion. She grows neither sour 
nor bitter, but she becomes interpenetrated by the 
pangs of many exquisite scruples. The mother of 
Jerome dies, and on her deathbed desires that she 
may see the hand of her son close in formal 
betrothal on the pale hand of Alissa ; but the girl 
cannot persuade herself that she ought to bind her 
young cousin with any vow ; she insists that they 
should wait until Jerome is more sure of his own 
mind. " Comprends," she adds, que je ne parle 
que pour toi-meme, car pour moi je crois bien que 
je ne pourrai jamais cesser de t'aimer." At this 
moment, infinitely perplexing for the young lover, 
with his alternatives of docility and exasperation, the 
mind of Alissa is slowly proceeding in a direction 
still undetermined to her own consciousness. 

From this point the relation between the lovers 
becomes more and more tragical. Various incidents, 
of a nature to enliven very agreeably and naturally 
the pages of M. Gide, interpose to prolong the 
inevitable delay, and to separate Jerome still further 
from Alissa. These obstacles, however, seem to 
Jerome to be exclusively of a material order ; his 
fidelity to his purpose is unshaken, and he never 
280 



ANDRE GIDE 



ceases to regard his cousin as his guiding-star. 
Unfortunately, in the world of Paris and Italy, in 
the turmoil of literature and society, he finds the 
instinctive devoutness of his carefully guarded 
youth break down in an indifference which he 
deplores but scarcely tries to resist. Somewhere 
Renan makes a very acute remark when he says, in 
effect, ^Me plus grand nombre des hommes a besoin 
d'un culte a deux degres." Jerome, in the advance- 
ment of his years, rests more and more wholly 
upon Alissa for his religious preservation. 

His cousin perceives this, and she retires from 
him. He must live for God by himself, or not at 
all, and in response to his passionate indignation, 
he receives a definite dismissal : " Adieu, mon ami. 
Hie incipit amor Dei, Ah ! sauras-tu jamais 
combien je t'aime ? Jusqu'a la fin je serai ton Alissa." 
The young lover, more ardent than ever, cannot 
but conceive that this is a trap laid for his too wary 
feet. In spite of prudence and duty, he will fly to 
protest to his cousin his entire, his unalterable 
ardour, and he will put an end to a false position, 
which scruples have made ridiculous, by insisting, 
at once, on a full and open ceremony of betrothal. 
He arrives, incontinently, at Fougueusemare, where 
the family receive him with enthusiasm, but only 
to find Alissa singularly changed. She avoids all 
private conversation with him, exhibits what in 
any one else would seem the evidences of coldness 
or disdain, and feigns — for it can but be feigning — 
to misunderstand every suggestion and every protest 

281 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



he makes. This mysterious situation culminates at 
length in another scene, at a subsequent and final 
visit to his uncle's house. Alissa now no longer 
shrinks from being alone with her cousin ; she 
desires him to see her as she is. She presents 
herself to him very dowdily dressed, without any 
ornament ; she! takes him into her private room, 
whence all her pictures and her books have 
disappeared, ^^remplaces uniquement par d'insigni- 
fiants petits ouvrages de piete vulgaire pour lesquels 
j'esperais qu'elle n'avait que du mepris," He finds 
her altered in mind, in taste, in appearance ; she 
has become wilfully colourless and dull ; she has 
followed the cruel counsel of the theologian — 
ahetisseZ'VOus ! and to the protestations of Jerome's 
anger and despair she replies with a gentle in- 
difference. ' Laisse-moi vite,' dit-elle — et comme 
s'il ne s'etait agi que d'un jeu : * Nous reprendrons 
cette conversation plus tard.' " 

The conversation is not resumed, and soon after 
this Alissa fades into a decline and dies. Her 
journals give evidence of a consuming passion for 
Jerome, against which she has contended, vainly 
stoical, to the end. I do not know where to find 
elsewhere in recent fiction so pathetic a portrait of 
a saint as M. Gide gives us in Alissa Bucolin. She 
is like one of the religious women that the Sienese 
painters of the fifteenth century loved to represent, 
shadowless and pale, with the flame of sanctification 
already quivering on their foreheads ; or like Santa 
Fina,as Ghirlandajo conceived her at San Gimignano, 
282 



ANDRE GIDE 

already lost to earth, ^'un fruit de souffrance" 
crushed into the cup of God's infinite mercy. But 
where the extreme skill of the author of " La Porte 
Etroite " is displayed is in the fact that while no 
element of Alissa's progress in holiness is caricatured 
or exaggerated, while every symptom of it is recorded 
with a perfect sympathy for herself and recognition 
of her aims, it is not with approval that M. Gide 
writes. We have not here a consecrated Huysmans 
vapouring about the ecstasies of St. Lydwine of 
Schiedam, but a man of modern training, clear-eyed 
and cool, who entirely appreciates the nature of the 
error he so closely describes, and regards it with 
deep disapprobation. The sacrifice which Alissa 
makes to scruple and to faith is a vain sacrifice, 
futile and wretched, a tribute to that religion 
'^against nature, against happiness, against common- 
sense," which is the final outcome of Puritanism. 
But to all such arguments surely there is no better 
reply than the old, familiar one of William Johnson 
in " Mimnermus in Church " : 

Forsooth the present we must give 
To that which cannot pass away; 

All beauteous things for which we live 
By laws of time and space decay. 

But oh, the very reason why 

1 clasp them, is because they die I 

In 191 1 M. Andre Gide presented to his readers 
a novel, *^ Isabelle," which is wholly unlike anv 
of his previous books in character and form, yet 

283 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

which could only have been written by himself. 
This is a story of strange adventures, or rather 
the revelation of bygone adventures, in a decayed 
chateau of Normandy. Gerard Lacase, the sup- 
posed author of the tale, who is writing for his 
doctor's degree a thesis on the chronology of 
Bossuet's sermons, is informed that an old gentle- 
man, member of the Academie des Inscriptions et 
Belles-Lettres, possesses — as people do in that 
wonderful France — a number of unpublished docu- 
ments, and in particular a Bible covered with 
annotations by the very hand of Bossuet. Lacase 
obtains an introduction to this M. Floche, who lives 
in a country-house near Pont-l'Eveque, and in the 
middle of September he goes down, in response to 
an amiable invitation, to spend a few days at 
Quartfourche. His arrival is described in some of 
the most admirable pages that M. Gide has signed. 
Nothing happens as he expected that it would. 
The route is winding, interminable, aimless in the 
vague light of fading afternoon. The park, when 
the broken-down carriage, which has been sent to 
conduct the guest from the train, reaches it at last, is 
sombre, overgrown, and deserted. As Tennyson says : 

He comes, scarce knowing what he seeks : 
He breaks the hedge : he enters there : 

The colour flies into his cheeks : 

He trusts to light on something fair. 

As a matter of fact, he lights on poverty, on eccen- 
tricity, on a baffling moral horror, the exposure 
284 



ANDRE GIDE 

of which, in a sense absolutely contrary to that 
which his young enthusiasm expected, gives the 
story its violent finale, its curiously disconcerting 
denouement. 

It would be manifestly unfair for me to spoil the 
legitimate surprise of the reader, which is led up to 
with an exquisite art. In fact, so far as the actual 
composition of ^Msabelle" is considered, M. Gide 
has written nothing more instinct with his peculiar 
magic. Possibly, however, on laying it down, and 
on freeing himself from its immediate charm, the 
reader will be inclined to regard this novel as a step in 
the direction of M. Gide's enfranchisement from con- 
vention rather than as a work of positive perfection. 
It is an experiment in a mode hitherto unfamiliar to 
him. An effect more purely objective than had been 
produced in his earlier stories is here striven after. 
The subject being, as we say, objective, it is possibly 
a mistake to have told the narrative in the first 
person, since it involves an attitude in the narrator 
which is often not a little unbecoming. In order that 
the mystery should be unwoven, it is found needful 
that the young student of Bossuet should engage in 
a series of investigations which that meticulous pre- 
late could not but have judged exceedingly indelicate. 
The young guest listens at key-holes, he spies out 
the movements of his hostesses, he opens and reads 
and acts upon a letter intended for no eyes so little 
as for his own. Probably, when M. Gide began 
his tale, he did not anticipate that it would be 
necessary to represent his young hero in the act 

285 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 



of so many outrages upon good manners. He was 
intent on the psychology of his figures, upon the 
play of character under extravagantly unusual 
conditions. But this necessity, which involves the 
reader in some embarrassment, could have been 
avoided by a less personal method of delivery. 

The cadences of M. Gide's prose are so delicious 
that I cannot resist the temptation to quote one 
more brief example chosen almost at random from 
his latest romance : 

Isabelle ! . . . et ce nom qui m'avait deplu tout 
d'abord, se revetait a present pour moi d'elegance, se 
penetrait d'un charme clandestin . . . -Isabelle de 
Saint Aureol ! Isabelle ! J'imaginais sa robe blanche 
fuir au detour de chaque allee ; a travers I'incon- 
stant feuillage, chaque rayon rappelait son regard, 
son sourire melancolique, et comme encore 
j'ignorais Tamour, je me figurais que j'aimais et, 
tout heureux d'etre amoureux, m'ecoutais avec 
complaisance. Que le pare etait beau ! et qu'il 
s'appretait noblement a la melancolie de cette 
saison declinante. ]'y respirais avec enivrement 
I'odeur des mousses et des feuilles pourrissantes. Les 
grands marroniers roux, a demi depouilles deja, 
ployaient leurs branches jusqu'a terre ; certains 
buissons pourpres rutilaient a travers I'averse ; 
I'herbe, aupres d'eux, prenait une verdeur aigue ; 
il y avait quelques colchiques dans les pelouses du 
jardin ; un peu plus bas, dans le vallon, une prairie 
en etait rose, que Ton apercevait de la carriere ou, 
quand la pluie cessait, j'allais m'asseoir ; ou, reveuse, 
286 



ANDRE GIDE 

Mademoiselle de Saint-Aureol s'etait assise naguere, 
peut-etre." 

Among recent imaginative writers M. Gide is 
perhaps the most obstinately individualist. No 
subject mterests him so deeply as the study of 
conscience, and in one of his early volumes I find 
this charming phrase, petulantly thrown forth to 
annoy the Philistines — Chacun est plus precieux 
que tons." Nothing vexes M. Gide so much as the 
illogical limits which modern discipline lays down 
for the compression of the human will. He has 
written in " L'Immoraliste " what I admit is an 
extremely painful study of the irritation and misery 
caused by a too definite divergence from the com- 
fortable type. He is impatient of the worry which 
is brought about by moral and religious abstrac- 
tions, and this I take to be the central idea 
pervading some of his strictly symbolical work, 
such as the strange drama of Le Roi Candaule" 
and the stranger extravaganza of Philoctete." 
These are books which will never be popular, which 
are even provoking in their defiance of popularity, 
which, moreover, bear the stamp of the petulance 
of youth, but which will always attract the few by 
the remoteness of their vision and the purity of 
their style. 

The strength of M. Gide's genius consists, I 
believe, in the delicate firmness of his touch as an 
analyst. He has no interest in groups or types ; 
his eye is fixed on the elected spirit, on the ethical 
exception. One of his characters in Le Pro- 

287 



PORTRAITS AND SKETCHES 

methee Mal-Enchaine " exclaims, " Les person- 
nalites, il n'y a que cela d'interessant ; et puis les 
relations entre personnalites ! " We have here the 
strait gate through which the author takes all his 
imaginary figures, and if their conventionality has so 
flattened them out that they cannot pass the test, he 
flings them from him. It is a most encouraging 
matter to the admirers of M. Gide that his progress 
as an artist has been definite and steady. He has 
grown from year to year in his sense of harmony, 
in his sympathy with human existence. In his 
early books he gave a certain impression of 
hostility to ordinary life ; his personal attitude was 
a little arrogant, tending a little to lawless eccentri- 
city. The beautiful human pages of "La Porte 
Etroite" show how completely he has outgrown 
this wilful oddity of aim. 

There is no other writer in Europe, at the present 
moment, whose development is watched with so 
eager an interest, by the most sensitive and intelli- 
gent judges, as is that of M. Gide. What will he do 
next ; what will he grow into ? Those are ques- 
tions which every student of living literature must 
ask himself as he contemplates the author of 
^^Pretextes" and of " Nouvelles Pretextes." He 
aims, we perceive, at giving a new direction to the 
art of the novelist, but who can feel sure that 
he has yet discovered the exact way in which this is 
to be done ? Thus he is for ever experimenting ; 
he is never satisfied, never content to be a cliche of 
himself. He seems to stand alone in the France of 
288 



ANDRE GIDE 

to-day, midway between the schools, now leaning a 
little to the revolutionary, now to the retrograde 
party. He is the opponent, I take it, of that rash 
and undisciplined improvisation which so danger- 
ously fascinates so many young writers nowadays. 
On the other hand, he is not delivered up, bound 
hand and pen, to the old logical lucidity of classic 
France. There is something northern about his 
genius, which loves to cultivate tremulous caprices 
and the twilight hours, and dreads the excess of 
light that glares through the system of French 
intellectual discipline. 

I have said that M. Andre Gide is more closely 
attuned in many respects to the English than to the 
French spirit. This is true, if we regard his 
attitude as a little belated. Since 1900 our native 
authors have adopted a vociferous tone, which is 
certainly not that of La Porte Etroite." English 
literature has, in this twentieth century, set up a 
megaphone in the market-place, and the prize is for 
him (or her) who shouts the loudest. But when we 
say that M. Gide is in sympathy with English ideas, 
it is of a slightly earlier period that we are thinking. 
He is allied with such tender individualists of the 
close of the nineteenth century as Shorthouse and 
Pater. Those who delight in the contrast between 
types of character, exhibited with great dexterity by 
a most accomplished hand, will follow the literary 
career of M. Andre Gide with curiosity. 



1909-12. 



T 



289 



IND^EjX 

It i 



INDEX 



Acton, Lord, 159 

" Age, The," Bailey's, 88 

" Age of Elizabeth," Creigh- 

ton's, 177 
" Angel World," Bailey's, 

85 

Arnold, Matthew, 155, 202, 
203 

Ashburnham, Lady Jane 
Henriette, 45 

" Atalantain Calydon," Swin- 
burne's, 5-6 

Bailey, Philip James, 61- 
93. Parentage, 69; first 
edition of " Festus," 71 ; 
the "Festus" of 1901, 72; 
the lyrical element in 
" Festus," 73 ; the keynote 
of " Festus," 76 ; the nar- 
rative, 78 ; reviewers, 82 ; 
first admirers and advo- 
cates of "Festus," 84; 
" The Angel World," 85 ; 
"The Mystic," 87; "The 
Age," 88 ; style and in- 
fluence, 85-93 

" Balder," Dobell's, 91 

Balestier, Wolcott, 215-225. 
Parentage, 216 ; early 
career, 216; life in London, 
217-220; characteristics, 
220-223 

Baudelaire, Swinburne's re- 
view of, 5 



"Bay of Seven Islands," 
Whittier's, 144 

Bellmann, C. M., 229 

" Benefits Forgot," B ilestier's, 
217, 224 

Bigg, John Stanyan, 91 

Benson, Mr. A. C, 217 

"Blake, William," Swin- 
burne's, 52 

" Borough, The," Crabbe's, 
146 

" Bothwell," Swinburne's, 52 
Brandes, Georg, 235 
British Museum, 11, 130, 131 
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 

8, 42, 84, 112, 115 
Browning, Robert, 54-55, 70, 

130 

Burton, Sir Richard, 32 

"Cardinal Wolsey," Creigh- 

ton's, 186 
Carlisle, George, 8th Earl of, 6 
Carlyle, Thomas, 65 
Catullus, 37 
Chambers, Robert, 89 
" Chastelard," Swinburne's, 6 
" Christian Year," Keble's, 156 
Churchill, Randolph, Lord, 

169, 170 
Cladel, Leon, 56 
" Coeurs Russes," Vogue's, 264 
Coleridge, S. T., 200 
Columbus, Samue], 229 
Concord Riots, 141 



INDEX 



" Cosmo de Medici," Home's, 
103 

" Course of Time," Pollok's, 
68 

Crabbe, George, 145, 146 

Creighton, Mandell, parent- 
age, 166; at Oxford, 167, 
177; characteristics, 167- 
i6g; at Embleton, 177, 
182; at Cambridge, 183; 
in Peterborough, 186; in 
London, 189; at Moscow, 
195 ; as a preacher, 194 ; 
person, 195 ; character and 
temperament, 191 

Creighton, Mrs., 172 

" Culture and Anarchy," 
Arnold's, 202 

Dead Love," Swinburne's, 
5 

de Vere, Aubrey, 61-63. 
Parentage, 119-120; char- 
acteristics, 121 

de Vogiie, Eugene Melchior, 
243-265. Person, 244-246 ; 
parentage, 246; early life, 
247; travels, 248-250; 
talent, 251 ; Russian in- 
fluence, 252-254 ; diplo- 
matic career, 249-254; 
Taine, 255; in Paris, 256; 
studies of Russian novelists, 
258-263 ; latest works, 264 ; 
" Revue des Deux Mondes,'* 

254-265 
Dickens, Charles, 47, 108-109 
Dobson, Mr. Austin, 232 
Dostoieffsky, 56 
Dryden, 229 

Dunton, Mr.Theodore Watts-, 
53 

" Earthly Paradise," 
Morris's, 203 



Eleonora, Ulrika, Queen, 229 
Eliot, George, 16, 263 
Emerson, R. W., 140-141, 210 
" English Historical Review," 

185, 189 
" Erechtheus," Swinburne's, 

42 

" Essays in Little," Lang's, 

210 

"Fair Device, A.," Bales- 
tier's, 223 
"Fairy Tale, A," Bailey's, 88 
" Faust," Goethe's, 72-74, 76 
" Festus," Bailey's, 69-73 
" Fifine at the Fair," Brown- 
ing's, 54 
" Flashes and Patches," 

Snoilsky's, 238 
Franzen, F. M., 230 
Freeman, Edward, 177 
" Friendship's Garland,'* 

Arnold's, 202 
Eroding, Gustaf, 238 

Gainsborough, 152 
Gardiner, S. R., 183 
Gaskell, Mrs., 40 
Gautier, Theophile, 35, 206 
Geijer, E. G., 230 
Gide, Andre, 269-289 
Gifford, William, 145 
Gladstone, W. E., 157, 159 
Goethe, influence on Bailey, 
74 

Goncourt, Edmond de, 28 
Gray, Thomas, 140 
Green, John Richard, 177 
Grey, George, Sir, 176 
" Guitar and Harmonica,'* 
Snoilsky's, 238 

Hallstrom, Per, 240 
Hardy, Mr. Thomas, 218, 223, 
269 



294 



INDEX 



Heidenstam, Verner af, 238 

Helen of Troy,' Lang's, 204 
Hewlett, Mr. Maurice, 153 
"History of the Papacy," 

Creighton's, 174, 176, 186, 

188, 189 
Holmes, O. W., 140, 141 

Holy Grail," Tennyson's, 

130 

Horne " Orion,'* character- 
istics, 98-100; early ad- 
ventures, loi ; marriage, 
108 ; in Australia, 109 ; his 
correspondence with Mrs. 
E. B. Browning, 100-115 

Hugo, Victor, 31, 34, 40, 41, 
203 

Ibsen, 56 
Idylls of the King," Tenny- 
son's, 129 
" Immoraliste, 1'," Gide's, 285 
" In Memoriara," Tennyson's, 
129 

" Isabelle," Gide's, 282 

James, Mr. Henry, 215 
"Jean d' Agreve," de Vogue's, 
264 

"John Inglesant," Short- 
house's, 154-162 

Jones, Sir Edward Burne-, 

"Joseph and his Brethren," 
V/ells's, 52 

Jowett and Mazzini, 6 

Keats, John, 63, loi, 123, 231 
Kipling, Rudyard, 221, 269 

" Lacon," Colton's, 64 
Lagerlof, Selma, 240 
Lamb, Charles, 53 
Landor, W. S., 40, 44, 52, 53 
Lang, Andrew, 199-21 1. Ver- 
satility, 200 ; individuality. 



202 ; eclecticism, 204 ; per- 
son, 206 ; wit, 209 ; tempera- 
ment, 210 

Leighton, F., 33 

" Letters and Literary Re- 
mains," Shorthouse's, 151- 
152 

" Letters to Dead Authors," 

Lang's, 210 
" Lettres a Angele,'' Gide's, 

269 

Levertin, Oscar, 238 

" Life Drama, A.," Smith 

(Alex.), 91 
" Little Schoolmaster Mark," 

Shorthouse's, 155 
" Lucretius," Tennyson's, 129 
Lytton, Sir E. Bulwer, 84 

Macaulay, Lord, 68 

Malherbe, 229 

" Manfred," Byron's, 72 

Marston, P. B., 49 

" Maud," Tennyson's, 129 

Maupassant and Swinburne, 

20-21, 27-31 
Mazzini, 18 
Meredith, George, 218 
Milton, John, 209 
Minto, WiUiam, 53 
" Miserables, les," Hugo's, 40 
Montgomery, James, 71 
Morris, William, 42, 130, 155 
Miiller, Max, 172 
" Mystic," Bailey's, 87 

" Natural Theology," 

Lang's, 205 
Newman, J. H., 122, 124-125 
'* New Poems," Snoilsky's,236 
" Night and the Soul," Bigg's, 

91 

" Night Thoughts," Young's, 
81 

North, Christopher, 124 

295 



INDEX 



" Old Friends," Lang's, 210 
" Orchids," Snoilsky's, 233 
" Orion," Home's, 103-107 
Oscar II., 237 
O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 49 
Ossian, 63 

"PAPACYjHistory of," Creigh- 
ton's, 174, 177, 186, 188, 
189 

" Paracelsus," Browning's, 69 
Pascal, 205 

" Patent Philtre," Balestier's, 
223 

Pater, Walter, 172, 288 

" Philip van Artevelde," 
Taylor's, 66-69, 71 

" Philoctete," Gide's, 286 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 29 

" Poems and Ballads," Swin- 
burne's, 5-6, 36 

Pope, Alexander, 229 

Pope, John XXII., 178 

" Porte Entroite," Gide's, 
271-282 

" Promethee Mal-Enchaine," 
Gide's, 286 

"Prometheus," Home's, 110 

Purnell, Thomas, 53 

" Queen - Mother," Swin- 
burne's, 5 

Ralston, W. R. S., 131, 133 
Redesdale, Lord, 13 
"Revue des Deux Mondes," 

254, 258, 265 
" Ring and the Book," 

Browning's, 54 
" Roi Candaule," Gide's, 

271 

"Roman Russe, le," de 

Vogiie's, 263, 264 
Romney, 152 
Ronsard, 203-204 

296 



Rossetti, D. G., 39, 130, 155, 
203 

Ruskin, John, 153, 200 " 

" Salathiel," Croly's,'68 
Sartoris, Mrs., 33 
Saturday Review, 177 
" Saiil," Gide's, 271 
Seeley, Sir J. R., 183 
Shakespeare, 41, 42 
Shakespere Society, New, 54^ 
Shelley, P. B., 24, 67, 82-83 
Shorthouse, J. H,, 151-162, 

219, 288 
" Short Poems," Snoilsky's, 

232 

" Simon de Montfort, Life 
of," Creighton's, 177 

Smith, Henry, 172, 174 

Snoilsky, Carl, 229-240. 
Parentage, 231; contem- 
poraries, 232; early life, 
232 ; in Italy, 233 ; in Swe- 
den, 234 ; literary work, 
236-239 

" Songs Before Sunrise,'* 
Swinburne's, 6| 

" Songs in Time of Change,"' 
Swinburne's, 52 

" Sonnets," Sir Aubrey de 
Vere's, 120 

Southey, Robert, 65-67 

SpasmodistSj The, 91 

Spectator, 5 

Spedding, James, 132 

Stevenson, R. L., 56, 207-2o8» 
269 

Stjernhjelm, 229 
Swinburne, Adam de, Sir, 45 
Swinburne, Admiral, 46-48 
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 
impression produced upon 
early admirers, 3 ; earliest 
works, 5-6; second period 
of public fame, 6; "The 



INDEX 



Atalanta," " Chastelard," 
"Poems and Ballads," 
"Songs Before Sunrise," 
6 ; physical conditions 
affecting genius, 8-15; 
unique appearance, 10 ; 
agility and brightness, 11; 
love of swimming, 12-13; 
characteristics, 14-15 ; Maz- 
zini, 17-18; at Etretat, 19- 
28 ; with Maupassant, 20-32 ; 
at Vichy, 33 ; Victor Hugo, 
34, 40-41 ; conversational 
powers, 36-39; study of 
Shakespeare, 41 ; the A the- 
ncEum and Erechtheus, 42 ; 
sentiment about literature, 
43 ; intellectual tempera- 
ment, 45 ; ancestry, 45 ; resi- 
dence in London, 47 ; coun- 
try home, 48 ; prodigious 
worker, 51 ; Browning, 54- 

55 ; Stevenson, 56; Ibsen 
and Dostoieffsky, 56 ; Zola, 

56 ; Cladel, 56 ; revolt 
against the mid- Victorian 
Era, 57 ; praise of the sea, 
175 ; Tennyson, 130 

Swinburne, Miss Isabel, 14 

Taylor, Sir Henry, 66 
Tegner, Esias, 230 
Tennyson, Alfred, 84, 129-134 
Thackeray, W. M., 84 



Theocritus, 210 
Thompson, George, 142 
Thornycroft, Mr. Hamo, 132 

182 
Tolstoy, 261 

"Tom Jones," Fielding's, 154 
Tourgeniev, 258 
"Tracts for the Times," 65 
Trost, Sven, 232 

Vallin, Theodule, Capt, 23 

Victorian Mid-Era, Swin- 
burne's revolt against, 57 

"Victorious Defeat," Bales- 
tier's, 223 

Virgil, 119 

"Voyages au Paysdu passe, 
de Vogiie's, 249 

Ward, Humphry, Mrs., 18 
215 

Warburg, Karl, 232 
Whistler, J. A. McNeill, 155 
Whittier, J. G., 137-147. Per- 
son, 139; characteristics, 
143 ; place as poet, 146 
WiUiam IV., 64, 65 
Winther, Christian, 233 
Wise, Mr. Thomas J., 5 
Wordsworth, W., 51, 65, 121- 

124, 157 
" Wrong Paradise, In the,'* 
Lang's, 210 



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